Expense Manager

Expense Manager is a single-user personal finance app built with Laravel, Inertia, and React. The product direction is chat-first money management: fast expense capture, reliable category mapping, statement import cleanup, and auditable balances.

Stack

• Laravel 13
• PHP 8.4 in CI
• Inertia Laravel 3
• React 19
• Vite 7
• Tailwind CSS 4
• Bootstrap 5
• SQLite by default for local development and CI
• Prism PHP for AI-assisted chat and categorization workflows

Core Workflows

• Manage accounts with opening and current balances.
• Manage parent and child categories for income and expense tracking.
• Create, edit, filter, export, and review transactions.
• Track budgets by category and period.
• Import and reconcile bank statement rows.
• Use AI-assisted categorization and chat-first money workflows as active product lanes.
• Sync data from a private external SQLite database with php artisan expense:sync.

Local Setup

composer install
npm install
cp .env.example .env
php artisan key:generate
touch database/database.sqlite
php artisan migrate --seed
npm run build
composer test

Development

Run the backend, queue worker, and Vite dev server together:

composer run dev

For front-end hot reload only:

npm run dev

Build

Install PHP dependencies, install JS dependencies, then compile the Vite/React front end:

composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader
npm ci
npm run build

Use npm run build any time you change files under resources/js or related assets before deploying. The compiled assets are written to public/build.

Verification

Use these commands before opening or merging a PR when practical:

npm run build
composer test

GitHub Actions also runs the frontend build, migrations, and PHP test suite on pull requests to main.

Expense Sync

The sync command accepts a local SQLite database path. Use your own private database path and keep it out of version control.

php artisan expense:sync --db-path="/path/to/private/expense-data.sqlite" --dry-run
php artisan expense:sync --db-path="/path/to/private/expense-data.sqlite"
php artisan expense:sync --db-path="/path/to/private/expense-data.sqlite" --force

You can also set EXTERNAL_DB_PATH in your local .env. Do not commit local .env files, private databases, bank statements, machine-specific assistant context, or real financial data.

Documentation

• Architecture
• AI Tools
• Statement Import
• AI-Assisted Development
• Roadmap

Project Status

Expense Manager is in active development. The current priority is the core money-entry workflow: chat-based capture, trustworthy categorization, statement import cleanup, and balance auditability. Broader dashboard and portfolio polish are intentionally secondary until that core workflow is reliable.