James Hollingworth’s Adventures in Code

Over the past year, I have spent quite a long time on my dissertation. I’m pretty proud of it and I have had quite a few positive comments from various lecturers (I’ve even been asked to write a paper on it for a journal). I’ve decided to write a few articles about my work, hopefully it will hope someone out. If your interested in it, my final report can be found here.

My project was a personal financial management application for students (the actual title was FAST: Financial Analysis for STudents although my final application was called Muney). Essentially I was having problems with my finances a while ago, being the good programmer that I am, I had a look at what software was available. To be honest, from a students perspective, Microsoft Money & Quicken are pretty terrible. Users are required to have a significant amount of financial knowledge to use them effectively. In their defense, these app’s aren’t really aimed at the student demographic.

This was obviously a known problem since I found a few web applications such as wesabe & buxfer, which were developed to solve just this problem. Although these applications are much more student friendly they were really basic, not offering solutions for tasks students are commonly pretty poor at performing (e.g. bill management, budgeting)

So based on this, I decided to develop a financial application which automates important monetary tasks and does so in a way which is easy for a student, with no prior financial knowledge, to understand and use. The application was written using C# & Castle Project’s Monorail framework a screen shot is shown below

The application had a variety of features including

• Bulk importing financial information via an OFX parser (currently open sourcing the parser I had to write to achieve this)
• Automatically renaming and categorizng transactions
• Bill managment (including automatically discovering new bills and recognizing transactions as payments for bills via clustering techniques)
• Automatic budgeting (including time series forecasting to predict a users expenditure)

Since i covered quite a few topics devloping these features, i’m going to split this blog into a series of articles. The application can be split up into three tasks, organizing, managing and planning a users finances:

Here are the articles discussing these tasks

• Organization
• Managment (coming soon…)
  
• Planning (coming soon…)