Adventure Money 1.0

Since I am the person who manages the money for our house, I need an efficient way to keep track of our expenses and an easy way to calculate who owes what to whom at the end of the month. There are lots of good free software utilities for managing money like GnuCash, KMyMoney and the wonderful Gnumeric spreadsheet. I had been using Gnumeric to manage the money for the last 8 months, but now that we have some people staying at the house for just the summer, and other leaving and coming back in September, the spreadsheet was not able to adjust to these irregular circumstances.

The reason I decided to write my own application from scratch instead of using an already existing money management application was because my problem is multi-person orientation and most (if not all) of the money management programs I have tried are single-person oriented. For example GnuCash will let you setup accounts that show you all the money moving to and from a single person. But in my house things like food are paid by any person and shared by every other person. Thus to efficiently and easily calculate who owes how much, it must take into account the fact that one pizza may be paid for by one person, but it was eaten by 4 people. Also I dont want to have to divide up the amounts myself and put it into GnuCash with multiple accounts, because then I might as well be doing it on paper.

I could have spent my time learning to make an already existing application do exactly what I want; and I probably would have found something pretty close. But I decided that it would be faster to just program it from scratch and then I would be sure I would get exactly what I wanted. I think I was right; it took less then 2 weeks to finished writing this program.

The program is currently called Adventure Money, but if anyone can think of a better name for it let me know and Ill gladly change it.

When you first launch the program you will see it has five views, all of which can be seen in the screenshots below.