Welcome to my Finances API and Dashboard!

1. Introduction

This is the API and dashboard that I use every month to keep track of my finances and spending. It inputs data from my monzo bank statements to a sqlite database and represents useful summary statistics and plots in an interactive dashboard.

I have used the python packages plotly and dash for the front end, allowing you to easily switch between months and analyse monthly trends with customisable plots.

2. Setup

• clone this repository using git clone https://github.com/erwallace/Finances-API.git.
• open the cloned directory on your local drive and run Finances-API\install_api.bat.

You are now ready to go!

3. Demo

Demon data is provided to demonstrate the required format of input data, however this data can also be used to create a demo dashboard. This is done using src\setup_demo.bat. This batch file will delete any previous demo database, create a new database, populate it with all the demo data and generate a dashboard.

This allows you to easily interact with the dashboard and see all the features without requiring any of your own data!

4. Input Files

For each month you will require 3 input files:

• a monzo csv bank statement (MonzoDataExport_{month}_{year}.csv).
• inputs_{mm)_{yy}.csv : this contains any monthly budgeting, end of the month balances of any accounts and paycheck/taxes information.
• investments_variable_{mm)_{yy}.csv : this contains the unit price and number of units owned of any stocks owned.

Examples of each of these files are available in Finances-API/src/data/.

5. Running

Remember to activate the virtual environment before running the script if you're not using an IDE:

call ..\venv\Scripts\activate

The API is run via the command line from the location of the pipe.py script (i.e. /Finances-API/src) with the following notation:

python pipe.py [action(s)]

actions

• --create / -c : creates new tables in the database (previous tables need to have been removed prior)
• --delete : deletes all tables and their contents from the specified database
• --append / -a : appends data from the date given to the database. must also specify a date (see below)
• --dashboard / -d : generates a link for the dashboard. A date must still be specified for this action
• --demo : can be used to select demo data/database/dashboard (see setup_demo.bat)

date

• --month / -m : specifies the month to be appended (July/july/jul/JUL would all be accepted for July).
• --year / -y : specifies the year to be appended (YY or YYYY)

e.g. python pipe.py --month July --year 2023 --append --dashboard is equivalent to python pipe.py -m jul -y 23 -a -d and will append data from July 2023 to the database before giving a link to the dashboard.

6. Unit Testing

All unit tests should be run from the root directory (/Finances-API) using the command python -m pytest. This will run all unit tests for the API. To run specific test modules, classes or units using python -m pytest <path to test module>::<test class name>::<unit test name>.

Thanks for reading! I hope you find this as useful as I have!