At work, I’ve been spending a ridiculous amount of time with Flex’s charting components. Eventually I want to move in to doing more of the Ruby on Rails stuff, too, though–so I’ve been trying to think of projects I could do on the side as a kind of warm-up diversion. Being new at the whole making money thing, I thought it would be cool to make a little finance-tracking tool with a few basic features…

1. I only want it for myself, but it should support users/logins so I can bone up on mySQL and RoR.
2. I should be able to enter expenses into one widget (like, literally, item by item off my debit/credit card statements) and tag them (with say, “Groceries” or “Movies” or “Entertainment”).
3. I should have another widget for income (which is not going to really change from month to month).
4. Last, I want a debt-widget. I don’t see this as something useful for monthly bills like rent, cable, etc… but something where I can keep track of exactly how much I owe and to who–I just paid off one credit card, but I also just signed up for another one for the TV. The dinette set and the student loans are also financed, not to mention the card I’ve carried through undergrad and grad school.
5. I want to be able to do monthly breakdowns and month-to-month breakdowns, and I want to be able to sort all that junk. For example, I should be able to say (or click on something that says: “Show me how much I spend on movies each month!” Or “Show me how much I spend on groceries vs how much I spend dining out!”

Just having the idea was enough for me–you can instantly see the potential for Web 2.0 tagness, some fun relational databases, and an excuse to do more stuff with Flex. I figured I’d at least do a cursory Google search to see what was out there, though.

Billster seems like it does a lot of what I propose, but not quite. There are a bunch of really fancy Flex charts, but it doesn’t seem to really support the type of sorting I envision. Although it supports keeping track of your earnings vs income, it doesn’t seem to have any support for keeping tabs on your total debt (which I consider to be pretty important). I guess paying off your debt is a lot like trying to lose weight. As long as you write everything down so you can be pissed at yourself when you don’t hit goals, you’re going to make a lot more progress than if you were just wandering around blind, wondering “Hmmm, I wonder when I’ll have that paid off…”

If I don’t get pissed off and scrap the whole thing between now and usefulness, I would eventually want to add another feature–retirement savings! Sure, I’m only 23, and I’ve only been working for a month, but it’s never too soon to start dreaming. I don’t see this as so much of a direct competitor with something like Billster because, mainly, I don’t really care if anyone but me uses it. I’m actually much more interested in sort of self-mapping and self-categorization in general. If I were actually going to try to spin this thing off into something public, I wouldn’t necessarily want to limit it to finance-type things. I used to use Guzzlefish (before its time), and while entering a billion things can be a pain in the ass…it would be kind of cool to chart something like number of DVDs that start with A vs the number of DVDS that start with B over time. Or action vs comedy.

So I guess what I really need is some sort of interface to let users create their own charts. And enter data. And share data between charts. But maybe that’s just dreaming too big.