How much can I spend?

Some quick thoughts on building Safe.

I keep a very close eye on my financials - every few days I work out how much money I have minus any bills still to pay, to then see how much I can spend per day. This takes quite a while. Before I built the following little app I’d have to:

1. Visit HSBC online and check my balance. This requires a key-fob which I don’t always have on me.
2. Work out how much I have left minus any bills. I know when my bills come out, but because there are quite a lot of them, I never know how much I’ve still got to pay past a certain date, so I have to go back through my statements and see.
3. Divide the amount left in my bank minus any outstanding bills by the amont of days left in the month (usually resulting in me counting through my calendar).

Quite a lengthly process. I fixed this with a little site I built on my day off this week. Say hello to Safe. Whilst it’s hardly complicated and coded terribly, it saves me a good chunk of time every day. Here it is (real numbers obscured):

Now all I have to do is login to my HSBC account on my phone, check my balance, input the value and the code I’ve written will do the rest. I can now see how much I can spend per day, how much I have left for the month, and which bills have gone out and how many I still have to pay. Whilst it’s not going to be helpful for everyone, it’s certainly helpful for me.

This is the first project I’ve built using PHP (I’m a HTML/CSS guy so this was a new experience - beyond a bit of WordPress and Blucommerce, PHP is a mystery to me). It was a really good feeling to be able to build this on my own (special thanks to Liam for checking over the code & logic). There are a few improvements I’m going to make functionality & design-wise, and currently the app is specifically catered to me in that all bills and the dates that they come out are hard-coded values. Maybe I’ll make a version where other people can use it, but it’s not something I’ll be doing any time soon I don’t think (it did only take me a day to code so I’m sure anyone else who wants something similar could do it in an hour or two!).

Update #1 (6th May 2013): A lot of people have expressed interest in using a product like this, so I’m going to do my best to build one. Considering this was my first project using this language, it might take some time, but I see it as a challenge. I’ll post on Twitter (link below) when it’s ready!

Feel free to hit me up on Twitter if you have any questions: @lewisking.