ExMan – the super simple personal expense manager

Being a bachelor; I stay with my long term (college) friends. When my colleagues get to know we all guys happily live together, most of the time I hear a “wow”. And we have a cook who prepares delicious food [most of the time ;-)], and we have a lot of common expense together, plus occasional/frequent personal expense things.

And yes, I dislike “Accounting”, and I hate keeping track of pennies spilt here and there. At the end of the month, I usually am at a loss, and I don’t care too much either. But I know I had to bookkeep something, but I detest that old fashioned “double entry bookkeeping”. I don’t want to care what are my assets, what are my liabilities, what is the liquid cash I have, and where to debit/credit, general ledger, blah, blah…

And I’ve been using GNote, the note taking application, for the purpose. But it needed manual calculation in the end anyway.

Few days back I realized that I need something better as I don’t want to sum all those items, meanwhile exclude some personal expenses or money lent to some guy. And I decided that it’s time to create a shiny new, uber-simple expense manager (which knows only how to add and/or exclude some entries).

The design concerns, in the order of importance, were:

1. Should be lightweight, and should consume less resources
2. Minimal external dependency
3. Maintainable, clean design and clean code

Which resulted in some of the design choices:

1. No database backend, instead a simple file backing store. The file structure is very simple, hence items can be easily added/removed/modified with a text editor as well.
2. Qt4 framework for development, which makes ExMan a cross platform application
3. (At least close to) Model-View-Controller architecture

It was exciting to develop on Qt4 platform, QtCreator and QtAssistant are awesome. Had fun with Signals/Slots, QTableWidget, QCalendarWidget, setCheckedState, SelectionModel,… learn by exploring.

And, without further ado, I present to thee, ExMan, the super simple personal expense/accounting manager:

The Monthly Amount shows the total of all expenses, and the Excluded Amount shows the total of items excluded (personal items and other things).

ExMan source tar ball and RPM are available in Sourceforge.net project page.

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Hacking gnome-power-manager

I have shortcut/Fn keys to Suspend, Hibernate, Lock the screen, Increase/Reduce Brightness etc… in my laptop. When power goes off, first thing I usually do is try to turn the display off to save power. Well – there’s no keyboard shortcut for putting the display to sleep or turn it off. I have to either run xset dpms force off or create a custom shortcut key and assign this command to it.

Instead, I’ve been thinking about adding a button to the gnome-power-manager. When I click on that, essentially my display will turn off. Further, I figured out I’ll have to use DPMSForceLevel (3) from manpages. There are already two icons, for Suspend and Hibernate, and I thought their implementation details might help.

So this morning, when I woke up, I directly went to the computer, downloaded the gnome-power-manager tar ball and started to look at the code. I must appreciate the fact that how clean the code is, and it was a breeze to extend the existing functionality. Surprisingly, the DPMS functions were already implemented. I just had to add a MenuItem to the Tray Icon, add the callback functions in place, and call “gpm_manager_blank_screen”.

And here is the outcome: