Home accounting software with chatbot based on Laravel

There is an interesting project called Firefly written in Laravel. The service allows you to take into account monetary transactions - accounting for income, expenses, transfers between accounts. And at the end it gives interesting analytics on your home budget.

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• Client: Center of Information Technologies
• Website: itvolga.com
• Completed: 18/10/2020

There is an interesting project called Firefly written in Laravel. The service allows you to take into account monetary transactions - accounting for income, expenses, transfers between accounts. And at the end it gives interesting analytics on your home budget.

The task was to set up, refine and implement this project.

Number of hours spent: 20.

Few families keep track of household finances. But it is very profitable approach.

Those who do this start with a simple notebook. Then they move on to spreadsheets. After long agony associated with the fact that there are too many transactions, the idea of ​​automating this process is born. This is how interesting home accounting services appear.

There are a lot of cloud services on the market now, but not all of them are suitable. Some people prefer something of their own, no monthly fee and flexible.

The client put forward the following requirements for the future product:

• standard home bookkeeping functionality,
• convenient entry of expenses from mobile devices,
• the system is deployed on a regular server,
• keeping goals,
• multicurrency,
• good translation into Russian,
• accounting of expenses by category,
• accounting for the balance of income and expenses,
• reporting system.

After market research, the only application that met these requirements was Firefly-iii.

I have configured the server, installed the certificate, deployed this application, made the initial setup and made minor improvements to the functionality.

The only drawback of this product is the lack of a convenient mobile application.

Therefore, a chat bot for Telegram was developed for quick entry of expenses and basic analytics on accounts.

The bot allows you to:

• quickly make some expense on operations,
• make a transfer between accounts,
• get account balances,
• check the balance of the family budget.

All data is sent and received through the service API in real time.

Thanks to the installation of such a service, we managed to achieve the desired compromise - we got a system that:

• was located on the client's own server (the cost of server maintenance is 1000 rubles per year),
• customized for individual requirements,
• easy to use from mobile devices (to make an expense, just write about it to the bot).