RandomPeon's Journal: Budget software

Why is the "Databases" icon a wheelbarow?

So, I've decided to keep a budget.

It would seem to a good idea to use some software to aid in this process....

But I don't want to spend money to track money. That seems silly. Money and Quicken both cost money so I think I'll be cheap and install Oracle 9i Enterprise Edition and roll my own schema and UI. (Yes, our Oracle license is generous enough this is even kosher.) Besides, I don't want to be entering a receipt from the grocery store and have a power failure throw my careful financial planning out of whack. Or the sheer absurdity appeals to me. Or I just feel like my Oracle knowledge is lacking.

I suppose you could have a single transaction table and use something like 'SELECT SUM(Amount) FROM Transactions WHERE Account="Checking";' to get a balance. You could use foreign keys to keep more specific information for each type of transaction. You could use constraints to disallow future expense that weren't prudent. And you could use different queries/views to generate some reports.

Anyone have any good suggestions in terms of a schema? The more bells and whistles, the better. Bonus points for using Oracle-specific features which extend the SQL standard.

Beyond that, what's a good choice for the website that goes in front of this massive misallocation of resources? Is it relatively easy to interface PHP scripts to an Oracle DB? I've used the Perl DBI in the past, but Perl seems like overkill here for the web development side of this. Possibly in the future I'd like to reimplement the web frontend using Java servlets, but I'd like to stick to one technology I'm clueless about per stupid project for now.

Feature request

[insanecarbonbasedlif]

Something that projects future balances based on past history.

Not just average growth/expenditures, but that says "Hey, this deposit occurs on the 1st and 15th of the last 3 months. I project that this amount will be added on the 1st and 15th of the next n months."

And conversely, "This payment to RYOG&E (Rip You Off Gas & Electric (What? You're not familiar? Move to Cali, it's beeaauutiful here.)) always comes out between the 17th and the 21st of the month, and has averaged $145 the past three mo

Re:Feature request

[insanecarbonbasedlif]

P.s. Schema? I know nothing of your schema. You'll get no schema specific ideas out of me!

/me runs away

Resolution

[RandomPeon]

Your feature request (11277713 [slashdot.org]) has been resolved as:

WONTFIX- No Oracle features used/Idea is too sensible and/or not geeky enough

What I was thinking was maybe a constraint that prevents future expenses that drop an account balance below $0 but permits past expenses to do so. A trigger that uses JDBC to query a corporate DB to adjust the liquor budget to the work volume. You could have a cron job entry that goes to Yahoo Stocks every hour, scrapes out the current values of everything you own and inserts

Currently...

[FroMan]

Currently I have a bit of a project I've been playing with (well, actually have not touched the budget software for about a year) for recording transactions. It isn't the most useful software, but you can get a look at it at http://crazydays.org/Finance. I currently use postgresql for the back end and servlets for the front end. The servlets are a homebrew for the real project I am working on. But I can get you a copy of the table layout if you are interested as it should get you going in the right dire