Family Budget

Budget calculator

My thesis is a budget calculator for families. Choosing the topic itself was not easy, because I wanted a program with tangible benefits that is purposeful and easy to use, while covering an area that interests me personally. Economic questions concern everyone — taxation, company structures, banking and finances, or general cash flow — so I decided on a family budget application where I could implement my own ideas. Plenty of similar programs exist, but they are often too complicated or miss basic expectations. The application can support both households and small businesses with simple cash-flow tracking. Recording transactions — income, expenses or transfers — is the foundation of the entire system: it powers reports, queries and summaries. Users can work with multiple time ranges, even daily budgets. Future versions will include more types of statements, such as graphs, charts and numeric summaries.

The plan is to add a loan calculator for users considering a loan, and to include budget drafts so people can compare projected and actual numbers. The planned statement will be calculated against the previous period.

An essential goal was to keep the interface user-friendly, so every menu item and option is easy to find.

I built the project in Microsoft Visual Studio using C#. The user interface is Hungarian. I tried to cover every gap that a household budget might have so the software could make everyday life easier for as many users as possible. I couldn't find schematics for the structure, so both the frontend and backend are fully my own design. As mentioned, the target audience is families and small businesses. I want to make tracking day-to-day income and expenses simpler, because keeping clean records is more important than ever. With multiple bank accounts across different institutions it is hard to see everything at once — my solution helps with that. Categorisation enables detailed overviews thanks to main and sub-categories. On the transactions tab you can filter and sort in addition to adding or deleting entries.

The project is still in progress; one chapter of my thesis focuses on future features. These additions expand possibilities without affecting the existing core functions — they build on top of them.