History

The Evolution of Dexter

The first program I wrote to keep track of personal expenses was written in Pascal and ran on an operating system named CPM. To run that program, I had to insert the floppy disk, then....

OK, that's too much history.

Fast forward: after trying several commercial programs and writing my own GUI applications I've come back full circle to a command line API. My current workflow uses a set of Python scripts that save transactions in a SQLite database. I moved away from a monolithic GUI because independent scripts are more effective if each one can focus on its part of the workflow. Using the command line means I can take advantage of command history, completions, and other features.

The GitHub repo has a rewrite of my current scripts. My goals were to

• transition from SQLite to a NoSQL database (mongodb)
• clean up and document each script
• create a more extensive set of unit tests

As of May 2025 the scripts in the repo are sufficient to carry out the main steps in my monthly bill-paying workflow. There are bound to be errors and incomplete sections, so the software is still in pre-release (beta).

Current Status (May 2025)

The modules currently in the repo are sufficent to run all the examples described in the tutorial section, starting with Create Your Project Directory. As you work through the tutorial you will:

• initialize a new database using account specifications in example files
• add records from CSV files downloaded from financial institutions
• use regular expressions to form transactions based on pairs of debit and credit entries
• use a specialized command line interface to process records that were not paired automatically
• run report generators to print account balances and expense transactions