SpendScope 💳

Personal Finance Analytics & Budgeting Dashboard

SpendScope is a full-stack personal finance web application for importing transactions, tracking spending, setting category budgets, and discovering useful patterns through an interactive dashboard.

Why this project

SpendScope is designed as a practical final-term project with a real database, REST-style API, responsive frontend, analytics, CSV import, budgeting, and anomaly detection — without requiring a complicated installation stack.

✨ Features

• Add, edit and delete transactions
• Import transactions from CSV
• SQLite database
• Dashboard with income, expenses and balance
• Monthly spending trend
• Category spending breakdown
• Budget tracking
• Highest-spend category detection
• Unusual transaction detection using a statistical threshold
• Recent transactions table
• Responsive web UI
• REST-style JSON API
• No external database server required

🛠️ Tech Stack

• Backend: Python 3
• Web Server: Python http.server
• Database: SQLite
• Frontend: HTML5, CSS3, Vanilla JavaScript
• Charts: SVG-based charts rendered in the browser
• Data import: Python CSV module
• Analytics: Python standard library

This deliberately keeps the project dependency-light so it can run reliably on a normal college laptop.

📁 Structure

SpendScope/
├── server.py
├── requirements.txt
├── README.md
├── .gitignore
├── LICENSE
├── data/
│   └── sample_transactions.csv
├── static/
│   ├── index.html
│   ├── app.js
│   └── styles.css
├── docs/
│   └── PROJECT_OVERVIEW.md
└── tests/
    └── test_api.py

▶️ Run

Windows

Open a terminal inside the project folder:

python server.py

Then open:

http://localhost:8000

macOS / Linux

python3 server.py

Then open:

http://localhost:8000

The application automatically creates spendscope.db on first run and seeds the included sample data.

📥 CSV format

CSV import expects these columns:

date,description,category,type,amount
2026-01-05,Salary,Income,income,50000
2026-01-06,Groceries,Food,expense,2400

Dates use YYYY-MM-DD.

🧪 Tests

With the server running in one terminal:

python tests/test_api.py

🔮 Future Scope

• User authentication
• PostgreSQL support
• Recurring transactions
• Exportable PDF reports
• Cloud deployment
• More advanced forecasting
• Mobile/PWA version