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Personal Expense Tracker

Course-End Project Problem Statement

Course-End Project: Personal Expense Tracker

Problem statement:

In today’s fast-paced world, individuals need to track and manage their expenses effectively. Your task is to build a personal expense tracker that allows users to log daily expenses, categorize them, and track spending against a monthly budget. The tracker should also be able to save and load expenses from a file for future reference.

Objectives:

  1. Design and implement a personal expense tracker that enables users to manage their expenses
  2. Allow users to categorize expenses and set monthly budgets
  3. Implement file-handling functionality to save and load expense data
  4. Create an interactive, menu-driven interface for ease of use

Steps to perform:

  1. Add an expense:
  • Create a function to prompt the user for expense details. Ensure you ask for:
    • The date of the expense in the format YYYY-MM-DD
    • The category of the expense, such as Food or Travel
    • The amount spent
    • A brief description of the expense
  • Store the expense in a list as a dictionary, where each dictionary includes the date, category, amount, and description as key-value pairs
    • Example: {'date': '2024-09-18', 'category': 'Food', 'amount': 15.50, 'description': 'Lunch with friends'}
  1. View expenses:
  • Write a function to retrieve and display all stored expenses
    • Ensure the function loops through the list of expenses and displays the date, category, amount, and description for each entry
  • Validate the data before displaying it
    • If any required details (date, category, amount, or description) are missing, skip the entry or notify the user that it’s incomplete
  1. Set and track the budget:
  • Create a function that allows the user to input a monthly budget. Prompt the user to:
    • Enter the total amount they want to budget for the month
  • Create another function that calculates the total expenses recorded so far
    • Compare the total with the user’s monthly budget
    • If the total expenses exceed the budget, display a warning (Example: You have exceeded your budget!)
    • If the expenses are within the budget, display the remaining balance (Example: You have 150 left for the month)
  1. Save and load expenses:
  • Implement a function to save all expenses to a CSV file, with each row containing the date, category, amount, and description of each expense
  • Create another function to load expenses from the CSV file. When the program starts, it should:
    • Read the saved data from the file
    • Load it back into the list of expenses so the user can see their previous expenses and continue from where they left off
  1. Create an interactive menu:
  • Build a function to display a menu with the following options:
    • Add expense
    • View expenses
    • Track budget
    • Save expenses
    • Exit
  • Allow the user to enter a number to choose an option
  • Implement the following conditions:
    • If the user selects option 1, call the function to add an expense
    • If the user selects option 2, call the function to view expenses
    • If the user selects option 3, call the function to track the budget
    • If the user selects option 4, call the function to save expenses to the file
    • If the user selects option 5, save the expenses and exit the program