$ cat work/budgetgen.md
BudgetGen — Smart Finance Manager
A personal-finance manager built end-to-end in Laravel: budgets, expense tracking, and reports — designed, built, and shipped solo.
PHP · Laravel · MySQL · Blade · Chart.js
The problem
Most budgeting apps are either spreadsheets with extra steps or subscription services that want your bank credentials. I wanted a self-hosted tool where a household can set monthly budgets per category, log expenses in seconds, and actually see where the money goes — without handing financial data to a third party.
The build
Classic Laravel monolith, deliberately boring where it should be: Eloquent models for accounts, categories, budgets and transactions; policy-based authorization so a household can share one instance; scheduled jobs that roll budgets over month-to-month and flag overspend early. Reporting is server-rendered with Chart.js on top — no SPA overhead for what is fundamentally a forms-and-tables product.
Decisions that mattered
Budget rollover is computed, never stored — one source of truth for balances killed a whole class of drift bugs. Categories are user-defined but seeded with sensible defaults, which turned out to be the difference between 'set up in two minutes' and abandonment. And keeping it self-hosted made privacy the feature, not a compliance checkbox.
The outcome
In daily use since launch for real household budgeting. The codebase doubles as my reference implementation for Laravel fundamentals done cleanly — the same patterns (policy auth, computed aggregates, scheduled rollovers) now show up in my client work.