Isaac McGarvey

Today I published my spending tracker app for Windows 10 on the Microsoft Store. It's called SigmaSpend. I first started working on it almost 6 years ago. I've only worked on it in spurts during that time, but still, I've spent quite a bit of time on it.

I never really intended it to be such a large project. My original intention was just to make something simple to replace the document I had started using for tracking my own spending. I figured it wouldn't take very long to get the basic functionality, and then I could just add whatever features I cared about if I felt like it. And that was true — I had the ability to enter transactions within about the first month of working just in my free time. And ever since then, I've been using it for my own spending data. But it was another couple months before I had basic reporting on the data. And even though it's still a very basic app, I've continued adding features on and off over the years. But I had never put in the effort to polish it sufficiently to where I felt comfortable publishing it until now. The fact that it was working great for me personally, even in its unpolished state, meant that I was less motivated to improve it.

One of the features I added that I spent the most time on was synchronization of the data between devices. Initially, I just used UWP's built-in roaming data feature. That worked well and made implementation easy. But I eventually discovered that the data is limited to 100 KB when my own data grew larger than that. So I switched to using OneDrive, which was a lot more difficult.

Part of the reason I wanted the synchronization between devices was so I could also use the app on my phone. I mostly enter data on my desktop PC at the end of the month when reviewing my bank statements. But it's nice to have a phone version in case I have to pay cash for something so I can enter that right away and not have to worry about forgetting to enter it later. I've been working on this long enough that my phone at the time was a Windows Phone, which meant that I could run the exact same app on my PC and phone, which was awesome. When Windows Phone stopped being supported, I started working on an Android version of the app. Although I do have a version of that that kinda works, it's unfortunately nowhere near being shippable. Maybe I'll finish that version someday. But adding that cross-platform support is another thing I've spent a lot of time on, even though it's not done.

There are a lot more features I'd like to add in the future: graphs, importing and exporting data from other formats, automatic backups, and better overall organization of the UI. But even without those features, I find the app quite useful personally. So I figured it was time to share and get some feedback. If you try the app, leave a comment or send me an email and let me know what you think.