I took a quick look under the hood of Budibase to get a rough idea of its capabilities. Before I start reading Budibase documentation in detail, I also want to designate a "north star" project. I've found this helps organize my thoughts when I explore a new piece of technology. Without a goal, I risk wandering aimlessly and losing interest. Keeping a project idea in mind helps me stay focused and absorb information in terms of how it relates to my project. For Budibase, I decided to dust off my idea to build personal finance software tailored exactly for myself.

I've used personal finance software to track my money ever since I had money to track. I started with Microsoft Money. After Microsoft shut it down, I switched to Intuit Quicken. As the world became more online, I switched to Mint. It didn't take long before I decided I didn't like doing my personal finances that way. (Well before Intuit bought and eventually shut down its competitor.)

When I started with Money, the usage pattern is for me to enter my financial transactions into my PC software. Then when I received my bank statements, reconcile what I entered with my statement to make sure everything matched up. By the time of Mint, such usage was still possible but no longer the focus. I was encouraged to connect to my financial services online to download account activity. Everything is entered and reconciled automatically. I totally understand why this was done. Most people don't want to spend the time to manually enter their transactions, then manually reconcile them. The modern usage pattern takes no time. But to my mind, such automation took away the first layer of awareness of my own finances. It's easy for small fraudulent transactions to slip through unnoticed, for example. I didn't like it.

After transactions are entered and reconciled, all personal finance software include analysis tools to help the user better understand where their money has gone. But as a data nerd, such graphs and charts were never good enough. I can bring up a chart, click to see more details about what contributed to that graph, and the drill-down always ends before I am satisfied with the level of detail. I understand that most people wouldn't care to spend time for such analysis, but I do! Spending reports. Flow of money. Account activity. More, I crave more!

I have come to accept the fact my own desires are not aligned with the general populace. Which meant I will have to roll up my sleeves and do it myself. Microsoft Excel seemed like an obvious choice as spreadsheets are intrinsically linked to finance. I started a spreadsheet to track my expenses and things worked well enough at the beginning. As my records grew, though, I started hitting limits of my Excel skills. It was good motivation for me to learn more Excel as I go, but eventually I recognized my mistake. Yes, Excel is the king of finance, but I'm not doing any financial calculations. (No compound interest, etc.) What I'm really doing is record keeping, which is a database job! I can continue learning Excel techniques to compensate for the fact it isn't a database, or I can switch to using a database.

I've approached this project idea many times. I had this in the back of my mind when I took Codecademy's PostgreSQL and MongoDB database classes, for example. I even got as far as creating a GitHub repository called "rogmoney", but I didn't do anything beyond setting up a Node.js environment. Looking at the timestamp I believe my thought was to build a personal finance app on Angular but I never even got as far as committing an empty Angular boilerplate app. Now I will make another attempt. It will help me learn Budibase whether the attempt results in my ideal personal finance tool or not.