Visualizing 48 Months Of Credit Card Spending With PyPDF, SQL & Looker
Constrained by the limitations of my credit card’s pre-filtered dashboards, I used Python, SQL & Looker to create my own.
For the end of the 2024 calendar year, I decided it would be helpful to do a retrospective analysis of my family’s credit card spend. This 2 part series of stories explores the larger problem-solving and design decisions associated with that project. If you’re interested in a more in-depth explanation for how I parse PDFs, my prior story offers specifics and code.
In fashion (not that I’m a style icon), there is a fancy term for custom-made clothing, “bespoke.” The advantage of this approach (and $$$$) is that the end product is exactly fit, tailor-made, to the unique proportions of your body.
The entire reason data engineering and data analysis exists is because, like the wealthy who demand a perfect fit, internal stakeholders seek solutions that are relevant to their business’ needs, like tracking progress against quarterly and annual goals. Luckily for those employed in roles serving data consumers, these individuals often find vendor-created UIs and dashboards to be too broad…
