University of Kwazulu-Natal

Building My Python Expense Tracker That Actually Saved Me Money

Bonisiwe Shabane
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building my python expense tracker that actually saved me money

Imagine that you’re sipping a hot latte from Starbucks on your way to work. You quickly swipe your card, and the receipt gets lost in your bag. Later in the day, you pay for an Uber ride, order lunch, and buy airtime. By evening, you know you’ve spent money, but you can’t say precisely how much, or where most of it went. That’s the challenge with personal finance. Traditional expense trackers exist, but most require you to manually enter every detail, select categories, and run reports.

After a while, you stop keeping track because it feels like more work than it’s worth. But what if your tracker were smart? What if it could: Automatically understand that “Dominos Pizza” should be categorized under Food & Drinks. Summarize your weekly spending in plain English, like: “This week, you spent $32,000 on transportation, $15,000 on food, and $8,000 on shopping.” If you've ever tried building a budget, you know how difficult it can be to get an expense tracker that does what you want it to do.

But how about building one yourself? Let's learn Python basics by creating a simple expense tracker that you can actually use. When I came up with this idea, I wanted to create an app that's more than just another command-line terminal app. We've built a few of those (like the simple To-Do List using Python). For this one, I wanted to use some GUI, so I decided we'll be importing the Tkinter library to have some usable UI elements. Libraries allow us to reuse code.

There's usually a library for most things you might want to do in Python. Importing them avoids rewriting all the code they contain from scratch. At the end of this, we'll have a decent idea of how Python works and be able to complete our first GUI-based Python app. You should check to ensure that your device has Python installed by checking the Python version. I've already covered how to link my favorite IDE (Visual Studio) to Python. Once you've gotten through the overhead of installing Python on your device and getting it updated to the current version, we can start by creating a new project.

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