Personal Finance CLI Tracker

A command-line app for logging income and expenses, categorizing them, and seeing a running balance and spend-by-category summary — with everything saved to disk so your data persists between runs.

Built as Day 1 of a 7-day Python project sprint (beginner → portfolio-ready).

Features

• Add a transaction (amount, type, category, date, note)
• View all transactions, filterable by category and date range
• Running balance and total spend per category
• Data automatically saved to and loaded from transactions.json
• Input validation so a bad entry (letters instead of a number, etc.) won't crash the app

Requirements

• Python 3.10+
• No external dependencies — standard library only

Setup

git clone <your-repo-url>
cd finance-tracker
python tracker.py

That's it — no virtual environment or installs needed for this one, since it only uses the standard library.

Usage

Run the script and follow the on-screen menu:

1. Add transaction
2. View transactions
3. View summary
4. Quit

Transactions are saved automatically after every change — you can quit and relaunch at any time without losing data.

Data model

Each transaction is stored as:

{
  "date": "2026-07-22",
  "amount": 45.00,
  "type": "expense",
  "category": "groceries",
  "note": "weekly shop"
}

What I learned

Stretch goals implemented

• Monthly budget limit warning
• ASCII bar chart of spending by category
• CSV export

Screenshot