Project idea · ungraded

Expense Tracker CLI

Build a command-line program that records your expenses, saves them to a JSON file between runs, and prints summaries: total this month, spending by category and your biggest purchases.

You will use

Milestones

Build the smallest working version first. Ticks are saved in this browser only.

01Ask for an amount, a category and a note with input() and keep the expense in a list of dicts.
02Save the list to expenses.json when the program exits and load it when it starts.
03Add a menu: add, list, summary, quit.
04Summarise totals per category with a dict, sorted from largest to smallest.
05Handle bad input (letters for an amount, an empty category) without crashing.

Stretch goals

Use argparse so commands like `python expenses.py add 120 food lunch` work without a menu.
Export a month to CSV.
Set monthly budgets per category and warn when one is exceeded.

Data

Your own expenses — or invent a week of them to test with. See the json module and argparse documentation.

Run it yourself

python expenses.py

Only the standard library is needed.