Hey 
We recently had some unexpected financial circumstances that pushed us to work out a better budget we can stick to… so today I built a financial tracker!
I wanted to be able to:
- Have the ability to set a monthly budget for each category of spending
- See how much the variable monthly bills are and when they are due
- How close we are to reaching our savings goals (our car needs love).
- Track how much I’ve spent on things I have control over (groceries, car fuel, household stuff etc…)
- and finally be able to see what the difference is between how much the bills were compared to how much we budgeted, so that if the bills were less, we could move that “extra” money towards a savings goal.
I’m a new forum member so I can only upload one photo for now, here it is!
It uses:
- helper input numbers for the budget, so I can define how much we will plan to spend on each category. I didn’t need to have them on the Lovelace dashboard, and frankly once we’ve decided how much we want to spend on each category every month it’s not something we’d need to change much, but I created a separate dashboard for now just for the budget setpoints and I’ll probably remove it later.
- helper input numbers for the “how much I’ve spent” sliders that will appear on the dashboard long term, so as I spend money on stuff like gas for the car or groceries I can adjust the slider to what I’ve spent that month.
- an automation to reset “what I’ve spent” each month to 0 on the first day of the month.
here’s where it gets interesting:
- IMAP integration that scrapes my enail for all my incoming bill notification emails. For each bill it extracts how much the bill is and when it’s due. Everything is on autopay but this way I know when it’ll get debited out of my account.
- Lovelace template code in a markdown card to calculate how much under or over each bill came in against the budget we set for each bill.
- Lovelace markdown card with template code to calculate how well I’m sticking to the budget for things I am spending on myself.
- one fun thing was that the cellphone bill email doesn’t specify when the bill is due, but I know it’s always the 2nd of the month after I receive the email, so I was able to use some tricky templating to take a complex date format and change it to the format of “Mon #”.
what I have left to do
- I use a bank that can be configured to send an email anytime there is a transaction on an account which includes the account balance, and they also let me have an account for each of my savings goals for free. That means once I figure out how to enable more than the default number of characters for IMAP text (email body content), I’ll be able to get live updated balances for my different bank accounts. that means I’ll have my budget account balance along with be able to convert the gauges from the screenshot from helper input numbers to imap sensors instead.
That’s about it! It was a rewarding afternoon.