dangerously incompetent

About

Awhile back I decided to try and start a budget and track our actual progress towards meeting it month to month. I wanted something simple, couldn't find much already available in the open source world, felt like playing with some Ruby on Rails, and now here we are.

Cheapskate is a Ruby on Rails application for creating a budget and tracking your progress against it. It is *NOT* intended to be run as a public website. I chose Rails because it's a project I wanted out of utility and not something I want to invest a lot of time in. Rails let me get it off the ground very fast. It is intended to be run in a secured environment, users should run the included Rails development webserver, make sure the port is secured from external access, and access the application through their web browser.

Features

• Create categories of income/expenses.
• Create budgets and defined allowances/expectations for categories.
• Budgets are versioned on a monthly basis allowing you to change your budget intermittently without affecting the data stored for the past.

Download

cheapskate 0.0.1 (2006-10-18, MD5: 0489a1905128c110ad87461c67ec1aed)

Requirements

Cheapskate depends on the following, at this point in time I have to leave it up to the user to figure out how to install/acquire these.

1. Ruby
2. Ruby on Rails
3. A database server with appropriate permissions
4. Ruby driver to communicate with your database

Installation

1. Create a databases.
2. Download and unpack the latest cheapskate.tar.gz.
3. Copy config/database.example to config/database.yml
4. Modify database.yml to point to the database you created. You should just need to worry about the development section, not test or production. Make sure not to specify the same database for development and test, test can be safely omitted if you do not intend to run the tests.
5. Run 'rake db:schema:load' in the top level cheapskate directory.
6. Run 'ruby script/server' in the top level cheapskate directory.
7. Point your web browser to http://localhost:3000/.

*WARNING*

As mentioned above, this application is bundled as a web application. In it's current state it's far from user friendly to install, and when you do you are technically running a webserver. Make sure you know what that means and how to lock down the port, otherwise the financial data you enter would be visible to anyone in the outside world who happened to point a web browser at your IP on the correct port.

Usage

1. Create some categories representing your sources of income or expenses.
2. Create a budget.
3. Create a new budget version.
4. Start adding allowances to your budget version.
5. Start adding events, actual transactions of money you received or spent.