Lazy finance (lbud for "lazy budget")

lbud aims to help building an easy, data-driven budget solution for personal use.

For examples of data, see example-data/.

Setup

python3.9 -m pip install lazy-budget

Workflow

lbud works in a very specific way: you declare

• the budgeting period (start and end date)
• how much money do you have (as of the first day of the budgeting period),
• how much do you wanna save (as of the last day of budgeting period),
• your financial operations.

Provided with the data described above, lbud allows you to see certain statistics over time, answers to these questions:

• How much more money can I actually spend today?
• How much money do I spend daily on average?
• When I spend too much money, for how many days should I limit my spendings to keep the money I set out to keep?

To start using lbud to manage your budget, you will need to create and maintain at least 2 text files.

Budget file

budget.yml is a YAML file that describes a single budgeting period. It is advised to keep the period short, but i am sure lbud can handle however long budgets. Example:

# total amount of money to use
total: 2000

# the part of the total
# that you aim to keep this month
keep: 1500

# budgeting period
start: 2021-04-25
end: 2021-05-10

# currency is optional
# USD is the default and
# the operations themselves can
# specify the currency (lbud add "-10 CAD" taxi), as well
# as the config file and CLI options
currency: USD

History file

history.csv is a CSV file that lists all of your financial operations. You may have one history file for all your budgets, history is filtered by budget period when performing calculations. It has to have following columns:

• money_value - operation value; may include a currency in multi-currency setups, format: -10.99 CAD;
• description - operation description; may include category, format: [category] description;
• dttm - operation date and time, ISO format.

Example:

-10,[food] snacks,2021-04-26T00:00:00
-1.95,[food] bubblegum,2021-04-27T17:20:31
-9.95,[food] hot dog,2021-04-27T00:00:00
-3.33,donation,2021-04-28T00:00:00
-30,[medicine] cardiologist,2021-04-29T00:00:00

Use of lbud on example files

$ lbud ls
           today : 2021-05-01
      total days : 16
       days left : 9
 available / day : $31.25
 CAN spend today : $163.52
     spent today : $0.00
 avg spent / day : $7.89
            kept : $1,663.52

$ lbud add -200 "club night"

$ cat history.csv  # added operation to history file
-10,[food] snacks,2021-04-26T00:00:00
-1.95,[food] bubblegum,2021-04-27T17:20:31
-9.95,[food] hot dog,2021-04-27T00:00:00
-3.33,donation,2021-04-28T00:00:00
-30,[medicine] cardiologist,2021-04-29T00:00:00
-200,club night,2021-05-01T00:00:00

$ lbud ls
                today : 2021-05-01
           total days : 16
            days left : 9
 days until can spend : 2
      available / day : $31.25
   CANNOT spend today : $36.48
          spent today : $200.00
      avg spent / day : $36.46
                 kept : $1,463.52

$ lbud cats
      medicine : -30,00 USD
          food : -21,90 USD
 <no category> : -3,33 USD

Charts

Burndown chart

Provides a bird's eye view of how things are going with the budget.

$ lbud bd

Category chart

Allows to determine how much money was spent/earned by which category.

$ lbud catc

CLI help

Note: all the defaults can be pulled from a config file at ~/.lbudrc.yml. To override the location, specify LBUDRC environment variable.

usage: main.py [-h] [-f HISTORY_FILE] [-c BUDGET_FILE] [-L LOCALE] [-C CURRENCY] [-t TODAY] {add,a,new,n,list-stats,ls,now,today,list,stats,s,get,burndown,bd,categories,cats,category-chart,catsc,catc,cat-chart} ...

positional arguments:
  {add,a,new,n,list-stats,ls,now,today,list,stats,s,get,burndown,bd,categories,cats,category-chart,catsc,catc,cat-chart}
                        budget operation to perform
    add (a, new, n)     add a new financial operation
    list-stats (ls, now, today, list, stats, s, get)
                        list statistics
    burndown (bd)       shows a burndown chart of the budget
    categories (cats)   display money flow by category
    category-chart (catsc, catc, cat-chart)
                        display money flow by category in a chart

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -f HISTORY_FILE, --history-file HISTORY_FILE
                        history file to use (default is /Users/oleksandr/finance/history.csv)
  -c BUDGET_FILE, --budget-file BUDGET_FILE
                        budget file to use (default is /Users/oleksandr/finance/budget.yml)
  -L LOCALE, --locale LOCALE
                        locale to use (default is pl_PL)
  -C CURRENCY, --currency CURRENCY
                        default currency to use in uncertain situations (default is PLN)
  -t TODAY, --today TODAY
                        a date used as "today" during stats, useful for seeing old budget info

Weird configuration stuff

There is a lot of configuration options to lbud (CLI arguments, config file, the defaults) and since it was tested and used in a very specific way, it might not work for you.

Feel free to submit a ticket or a pull request (idk if it works, i'm new to this open source thing, please post a ticket about it too).

Posting the way it is actively being used for clarity:

• budget/history files at ~/finances/
• config file at ~/.lbudrc.yml:

  history_file: /Users/oleksandr/finances/history.csv
  budget_file: /Users/oleksandr/finances/budget.yml
  locale: pl_PL
  currency: PLN
  

• lbud anywhere