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Vision
Project Vision Statement
Vision StatementMarket ContextIn the world of personal budgeting there lie two extremes. On the one extreme there is the ability to do all of your budgeting online with websites hosted on large servers with a service available for tracking your money. These services usually have some cost associated with them (YNAB) or advertising to support them (Mint.com) and may not offer all the features a user would like. Additionally you run the counter party risk of your privacy being compromised for the sake of advertising, data-mining and other corporate action. On the other extreme is the home budgeting software where all budgeting actions take place on your home computer. This often requires the manual entering of transactions and does not offer any flexibility in accessing your data via mobile means. Goals of this projectThe goal of this project is to meet in the middle of these two extremes. With modern computing power being exponentially higher than just a few years ago, and with the advent of ready access to the internet, I want to design a system that bridges the gap between "out of your control" and "only available at home." The Envelope Budgeting Site application achieves this compromise by allowing the user to set up his own budgeting site at home on a lightweight tomcat server. The site will allow him to track all of his data online and via mobile with ease. Additionally it should be easily configurable so as to allow for a community of developers to rapidly respond to users desires. SummaryThe Envelope Budgeting Site will be a freely available piece of software which will work out of the box with MySQL and Apache Tomcat 7, both freely available and very popular projects. The program will guide the users through setting up the application and shelter them from the technical details as much as possible. StakeholdersThe primary stakeholders of this program will be the users themselves and anyone they allow to create an account on their sites. Key FeaturesA key feature of the program will be its use of the "Envelope Budgeting" approach made popular by renowned personal finance radio host and best selling author Dave Ramsey. Many followers of Dave Ramsey do not use credit cards and thus don't derive much convenience from Mint.com (which prides itself in auto-updating based on transactions). Additionally the system will provide the ability to remotely check how much is remaining in an envelope without being at home, or carrying a copy your data to numerous places. A key feature will be the support for a mobile site. Lastly the project will be and shall forever remain 100% free of charge to all who use it. This program is licensed under the GNU Public License Version 3 and remains free of any proprietary charges by the developer or any of his agents. ConstraintsThe system must be easy to install and use, without the need for mass amounts of configuration which could confuse non-power users. The system needs to be secure and protect data from corruption and interception, and provide a means to backup the data as well. Note that the license does not provide any warranty for this software or data and the developer claims no liability for any data that is lost, stolen, or corrupted by your use of this program. |