From Google Sheets to App: My Low-Code Personal Expense Manager

I hate keeping tabs on my daily expenses and forget adding some of them manually. Here, I’m excited to share my journey of creating a personal expense manager using a couple of low-code tools.

This project demonstrates how you can build apps using tools like Google Sheets, and AppSheet without writing traditional code.

The screenshot of the app I created

The Foundation: Google Sheets

Google sheets remains the only database for the app. A sheet stores all the expense transaction labelled. In a different sheet, a couple of formulas are put together to draw the data chart.

The sheet has columns like ‘expense category’, ‘date’, ‘amount’, and ‘expense note’.

Snippet of Google Sheets

Automating Data Entry with Power Automate

To streamline the data entry process, I utilized Power Automate to fetch expense data from my email. Here’s a brief overview of how I set it up:

• I created a nudge in Power Automate to capture emails tagged with a particular label — e.g. bank debit emails.
• Further, the raw email body is parsed to fetch information like transaction amount, date and merchant. Also, a mapping helps me put each expense in some pre-defined categories.
• It then automatically populates this data into my Google Sheet, saving me the hassle of manual entry.

Building the App Interface with AppSheet

With my data neatly organized in Google Sheets, I turned to AppSheet to create a user-friendly interface. Here’s how I transformed my sheet into an app:

• I connected AppSheet to my Google Sheet, which it used as the data source.
• I designed multiple views: a list view for all expenses, a form view for adding new expenses, and a dashboard for visualizing spending patterns.
• I incorporated charts and graphs to provide visual representations of my spending habits.

Conclusion

Creating this low-code expense tracker has simplified my financial tracking. By combining the said tools, I’ve created a custom app that meets my needs without writing any traditional code.

I hope this inspires you to explore the world of no-code development. Also, helps you to create your own solutions to everyday problems. All the tools used here are free and possibilities are endless.