Finance Tracker

Program Description

Finance Manager is a program used to track a user's income and costs/spending to help make informed financial decisions. The program adds three neat features to your 'bank account' to build healthy financial habits such as spending within budget, avoiding impulsive purchases, and reviewing your monthly spending patterns. This program can be used by anyone but it will be most useful to students with limited budget that has to make the most out of their budget to navigate college life full of expenses. I personally splurge sometimes and tend to forget my goals so a program like this would help me build strong and healthy financial habits.

Budget Sergeant

This feature acts like your financial drill sergeant. Since our bank account balance does not reflect what we can actually afford, we need the Budget Sergeant to check our saving goals, budget limits, and monthly payments due (Netflix, utilities bill etc.) with regard to your monthly income to ensure you can really afford the purchase. This ensures the user stay within budget and avoid impulsive purchases that go against their financial goals.

Instructions for users:

• You can generate the first required event related to adding Xs to a Y by choosing the make a purchase option on the menu after you deposit money in the bank.
• You can generate the second required event related to adding Xs to a Y by making another purchase with enough balance and observing the list of purchases made so far in right bottom panel.
• You can add other X to Ys by adding and updating the saving goals by choosing the third option in the menu.
• You can locate my visual component by either saving or loading menu. If successful, the top panel should display green; otherwise, it should be red with error message show file exception.
• Another major visual component when you add a purchase, it is added to the spending list in the right bottom panel.
• You can save the state of my application by selecting save file on left menu after entering username.
• You can reload the state of my application by selecting load file on left menu after entering username

Example Logging Data:

----------------------------------
Printing all event logs...

Fri Dec 02 15:37:55 PST 2022 
Deposited $1000.0 into bank balance

Fri Dec 02 15:38:03 PST 2022
Withdrawn $200.0 from bank balance

Fri Dec 02 15:38:13 PST 2022
Withdrawn $300.0 from bank balance

Fri Dec 02 15:38:13 PST 2022
A new purchase was made and added to list of spending!

Fri Dec 02 15:38:19 PST 2022
Saving goal updated to: $250.0


Fri Dec 02 15:38:19 PST 2022
User has started saving!

Fri Dec 02 15:38:32 PST 2022
Withdrawn $50.0 from bank balance

Fri Dec 02 15:38:32 PST 2022
A new purchase was made and added to list of spending!
----------------------------------

Future Design Improvements:

• The class diagram shows that there was good design for the most part of my program.
• However, since only one instance of BankApp is needed for the entire program but it is frequently used in many cases, especially the GUI. Hence, I would refactor to implement BankApp using Singleton design pattern. This way, the GUI, MenuGUI, JsonReader and JsonWriter class can get the shared single instance of BankApp easily.
• I would also break down the MenuGUI class into different classes so it is maintained much easier. Currently, it has too much methods that are not cohesive enough and performed various tasks under the GUI class.
• With regards to the last thought, I would make an abstract class GUI with certain "frame" requirements and methods then make other classes implement it's respective frame.
• With the last suggestion, this would connect the GUI and MenuGUI more naturally instead of being a bit more isolated like the current state.