Finance Tracker

A personal finance tracker you can also update by just texting it — log an expense from Telegram without ever opening the app.

What it is

Finance Tracker is a MERN-stack web app for keeping track of day-to-day spending: log expenses, see where the money actually goes, set a savings goal tied to a real salary, and get warned by email before overspending. It also supports adding expenses hands-free straight from a chat app — no need to open the app at all.

Live app: financetracker.blog

Screenshots

Dashboard	Insights
Save More — salary & spending alerts	Chat Automation — Telegram

Drop your own screenshots into docs/screenshots/ using the filenames above (landing.png, dashboard.png, insights.png, save-more.png, automation.png) and they'll render here automatically.

Features

Expense tracking

• Add, inline-edit, and delete records — description, amount, category, payment method
• Multi-currency display, switchable at any time
• Monthly totals reset automatically each month, full history preserved

Insights

• Spending broken down by category with a visual composition chart
• Monthly breakdown table, highest-spending category and month at a glance

Savings goals & spending alerts

• Set a monthly salary and track what share of it has been spent
• Salary is encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM) — not readable directly from the database, even by an admin
• Automatic email alerts at 30% and 50% of salary spent
• A monthly recap email itemizing every transaction, sent automatically

Chat automation — $2/month

• Add expenses by messaging a bot: Groceries, 45.50, Food, Cash
• Category and payment method are optional, defaulting to Other/Cash
• WhatsApp and Messenger support built and ready, pending Meta business approval
• Subscription billing and cancellation handled through Stripe

Auth & security

• Sign in with Google or Facebook via Clerk
• Field-level encryption for sensitive financial data
• Verified sending domain for all outbound email

Tech stack

Frontend	React 19 · TypeScript · Vite · React Router
Backend	Express · TypeScript · MongoDB / Mongoose
Auth	Clerk (Google & Facebook OAuth)
Payments	Stripe (subscriptions + webhooks)
Email	Resend
Chat automation	Telegraf (Telegram Bot API), Meta Cloud API (WhatsApp / Messenger)
Hosting	Vercel — frontend and backend both deployed as serverless functions

Project structure

finance_tracker/
├── backend/
│   ├── api/              Vercel serverless entry point
│   └── src/
│       ├── controllers/
│       ├── model/
│       ├── routes/
│       └── utils/
└── frontend/
    └── finance_tracker/   React app (Vite)
        └── src/
            ├── Pages/
            ├── components/
            └── context/

Running locally

Backend

cd backend
npm install
cp .env.example .env   # fill in your own values — see comments in the file
npm run dev

Frontend

cd frontend/finance_tracker
npm install
cp .env.example .env   # fill in your own values
npm run dev

Each .env.example lists every required variable with a comment on where to get it.