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97 lines
4 KiB
Markdown
97 lines
4 KiB
Markdown
# How are you handling your shared expenses?
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**TL;DR:** We're kick-starting a new application to manage your shared
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expenses. Have a look at <http://ihatemoney.notmyidea.org>
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As a student, I lived in a lot of different locations, and the majority
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of them had something in common: I lived with others. It usually was a
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great experience (and I think I will continue to live with others). Most
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of the time, we had to spend some time each month to compute who had to
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pay what to the others.
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I wanted to create a pet project using flask, so I wrote a little (\~150
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lines) flask application to handle this. It worked out pretty well for
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my housemates and me, and as we had to move into different locations,
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one of them asked me if he could continue to use it for the year to
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come.
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I said yes and gave it some more thoughts: We probably aren't the only
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ones interested by such kind of software. I decided to extend a bit more
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the software to have a concept of projects and persons (the list of
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persons was hard-coded in the first time, boooh\!).
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I then discussed with a friend of mine, who was excited about it and
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wanted to learn python. Great\! That's a really nice way to get started.
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Some more friends were also interested in it and contributed some
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features and provided feedback (thanks
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[Arnaud](http://www.sneakernet.fr/) and Quentin\!)
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Since that, the project now support multiple languages and provides a
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REST API (android and iphone apps in the tubes\!), into other things.
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There is no need to register for an account or whatnot, just enter a
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project name, a secret code and a contact email, invite friends and
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that's it (this was inspired by doodle)\!
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You can try the project at <http://ihatemoney.notmyidea.org> for now,
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and the code lives at <https://github.com/spiral-project/ihatemoney/>.
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## Features
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In the wild, currently, there already are some implementations of this
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shared budget manager thing. The fact is that most of them are either
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hard to use, with a too much fancy design or simply trying to do too
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much things at once.
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No, I don't want my budget manager to make my shopping list, or to run a
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blog for me, thanks. I want it to let me focus on something else. Keep
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out of my way.
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### No user registration
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You don't need to register an account on the website to start using it.
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You just have to create a project, set a secret code for it, and give
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both the url and the code to the people you want to share it with (or
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the website can poke them for you).
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### Keeping things simple
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"Keep It Simple, Stupid" really matches our philosophy here: you want to
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add a bill? Okay. Just do it. You just have to enter who paid, for who,
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how much, and a description, like you would have done when you're back
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from the farmer's market on raw paper.
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### No categories
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Some people like to organise their stuff into different "categories":
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leisure, work, eating, etc. That's not something I want (at least to
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begin with).
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I want things to be simple. Got that? Great. Just add your bills\!
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### Balance
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One of the most useful thing is to know what's your "balance" compared
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to others. In other words, if you're negative, you owe money, if you're
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positive, you have to receive money. This allows you to dispatch who has
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to pay for the next thing, in order to re-equilibrate the balance.
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Additionally, the system is able to compute for you who has to give how
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much to who, in order to reduce the number of transactions needed to
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restore the balance.
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### API
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All of what's possible to do with the standard web interface is also
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available through a REST API. I developed a simple REST toolkit for
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flask for this (and I should release it\!).
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## Interested?
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This project is open source. All of us like to share what we are doing
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and would be happy to work with new people and implement new ideas. If
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you have a nice idea about this, if you want to tweak it or to fill
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bugs. Don't hesitate a second\! The project lives at
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<http://github.com/spiral-project/ihatemoney/>
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