University of Kwazulu-Natal

How I Built A Personal Expense Tracker With Python And Google Sheets

Bonisiwe Shabane
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how i built a personal expense tracker with python and google sheets

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.” Your task for today is to build a function-based expense tracker that records and summarizes spending.

This real-world project teaches you how to manage data with lists, design modular functions, and export results — skills that are useful in everyday automation and productivity tools. Use a list of dictionaries to store expense records (e.g., {"description": "Lunch", "amount": 12.50}). add_expense(description, amount) → adds an expense to the log list_expenses() → prints all expenses in a readable table total_expenses() → returns the sum of all amounts An expense tracker is an essential tool that helps individuals and businesses manage their financial transactions.

With an expense tracker, you can create budgets, categorize expenses, and analyze spending patterns. Find out how to build an expense tracker app, with a cross-platform GUI, in Python. To build this expense tracker, you’ll need the Tkinter, CSV, and Matplotlib modules. Tkinter lets you create desktop applications. It offers a variety of widgets like buttons, labels, and text boxes that make it easy to develop apps. The CSV module is a built-in Python library that provides functionality for reading and writing CSV (Comma-Separated Values) files.

Personal budget tracker is used to manage your income and expenses. Here, we will create personal budget tracker in Python using different approaches. Dictionaries are the most convenient form of working with sets of values, therefore, our income and expenses will be managed in the same manner. This method makes it easy for us to classify our financial data and normal tasks such as entry of new data, computation of totals and preparation of summary can be done effortlessly. We create two dictionaries: one for income and one for expenses. Every type (like "Salary" or "Rent") is key in the dictionary, and the every corresponding amount is the value.

This allows us to categorize and sum our income and expenses easily. The script prints out a summary of all income and expenses, along with the total income, total expenses, and net savings (income minus expenses). We implement OOP principles into our budget tracker in order to improve its modularity. In other words, it helps to organize the data and the functionality into an easily understandable form and easily reuse them. This approach also facilitates easy management, modification and scalability in future hence meets the modern learning institution’s needs. Managing personal finances is a skill and building your own tool to do it?

That’s empowering. In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through how to create a command-line based Expense Tracker in Python that stores and analyzes expenses using a CSV file. This project is part of my hands-on learning journey to grow more confident in Python and command-line tools. It’s beginner-friendly, practical, and something you can actually use or expand into a larger app. We start by writing a function to add user input to the CSV: You can view the full project and code here:👉 GitHub Link to Your Repository

This project is a great way to get comfortable using Python in a practical way. You’ll understand how to work with real data, write clean code, and build useful tools—skills that form the backbone of software development.

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