pfr is a command-line tool for helping me to manage my personal finances. It’s written in Rust. You can visit it here on GitHub or here on crates.io.
At the end of each month, I like to sit down and “allocate” funds to cover my expenses for the following month. However, not all of my expenses occur monthly. For example, things like rent are paid weekly, and I think of money spent on food in terms of weeks, so I have to multiply those expenses by 4 (ish). I also have to figure out how much money to put in each account, e.g on my EFTPOS (direct-debit) card or for automatic payments.
It’s not hard, but then again, that’s why we write programs.
We automate tasks not because they are hard, but because they are easy.
— JKF
You can tell pfr what your incomes and expenses are, and how often they occur, like so;
# I recieve $800 per month from part-time work. pfr add income mthly work 800 # I spend $40 per week on food, and this comes out # of my EFTPOS (direct-debit) bank account: pfr add expense wkly food 40 --account "direct debit" # Insurance for my car costs about $20 per month, # and this comes out of my automatic payments bank account. pfr add expense mthly "car insurance" 20 --account automatic --category car # I fill up my car once a month, and this costs about # $100, but this comes out of my EFTPOS account. pfr add expense mthly petrol 100 --account "direct debit" --category car
And here’s what a report generated with pfr looks like:
$ pfr report
Monthly Report
INCOME EXPENDITURE VALUE CATEGORY ACCOUNT
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
petrol ( 100.00) car direct debit
work 800.00
car insurance ( 20.00) car automatic
food ( 171.20) direct debit
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
TOTAL: 508.80
Breakdown:
car 120.00
(other) 171.20
Coverage:
20.00 -> automatic
271.20 -> direct debit
0.00 (unallocated)
(Notice that the transactions that were added as “weekly” have been extrapolated out to a 30-day month, or about 4.3 weeks).
The report shows information about all of your transations in the table at the top, including whether they are an income or an expense, the value of the transaction, and, for expenses, the category and account that the expense is drawn from.
The next section, the Breakdown, shows your expenses broken down by category. In this case, we only have one category, car, and the remainder of the expenses don’t have an associated category.
The last section, Coverage, shows the value of funds that need to be moved into each account in order to cover the expenses for the month. In this case, you can see that you need to put $20.00 into your automatic account, and $271.20 into your direct debit account in order to cover your expenses for the month.
If you just want to see which transactions you’ve told pfr about, you can use pfr list;
$ pfr list mthly expense petrol 100.00 mthly expense car insurance 20.00 wkly expense food 40.00 mthly income work 800.00
And thanks to structopt there’s also a handy-dandy help command;
$ pfr help
pfr 0.1.1
Antony Southworth <southworthy@gmail.com>
personal finance reporter.
USAGE:
pfr <SUBCOMMAND>
FLAGS:
-h, --help Prints help information
-V, --version Prints version information
SUBCOMMANDS:
add add a new entry.
help Prints this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)
init init the list of entries.
list list the current entries.
report generate a report for the month
rm remove an existing entry.
Feel like giving it a try?
cargo install pfr pfr init
Or, if you’d like to take a look at the (brief) source code;
git clone https://github.com/KyussCaesar/pfr.git
kyuss-caesar 