There was a time when we used to write down all the transactions we made, either on a notebook, a spreadsheet or an app, to understand how we spend our money. Well, this method could be quite time-consuming, it takes effort and it requires consistency.

This article aims to provide you with a consolidated financial habit to efficiently keep your spending in check. In case you are a beginner Python programmer I hope this article will also inspire you with a practical use case that you can personalize in line with your own needs.

Problem Statement

Some of us use mobile apps to check how we spend our money. Personally, to track my expenses I use Yolt, an app that allows you to put all of your bank accounts in one place thanks to open banking.

What you mayhave realized is that Yolt and digital banks’ apps like Revolut or Monzo still have limitations in terms of how you can customize your finances’ reports. For example, Yolt currently doesn’t allow you to edit the categories of your expenses and so you can’t group Lunch, Eating out and Takeaway into one single Food category. Moreover, the app might put your gym membership under Groceries or your flight purchase under Personal care. Surely this will not help you to keep in touch with your spending.

So how can we bring our Money Management to the next level?

Solution

One way of solving this problem is by using Python to manipulate our transactions data and create a personalized monthly report of our finances, categorizing expenses in the best way that resonates with you. What we need to do is to gather monthly data and to choose our expenses’ categories (only when running the code for the first time).

You can find the whole script at this link. You can access it to better follow along or to edit the code depending on your needs.

Before starting it is important to note that the benefit of budgeting is not in creating neat graphs or dashboards. These are means to make you identify your worst spending areas and help you get better control over them. The real value is not in the chart. The real value is in how that chart changes your behavior.

Let’s see how we can better manage our money using the following 5 Steps.

• Step 1: Import Python Libraries and Get the Data
• Step 2: Get the Data
• Step 3: Manipulate the Data and Customize your transactions’ categories
• Step 4: Design your Monthly Report
• Step 5: Build the Final Dashboard

#money-management #dash #python #money #budget