A Simple Business Expenses App

I use Crunch Accounting to manage my business finances and after a bit of controversy recently about charging for an expense logging app, I decided to try building my own simple web app. The official app, Snap, used people and OCR to convert pictures of receipts into actual expense entries (this is why its worth the monthly fee), I knew I couldn't achieve this but most expenses are just a supplier, description and price so that could be easily entered on its own.

In addition to capturing these pieces of information I decided to try capturing expense images using the html capture tag on file input fields which triggers the camera on mobile devices. This turned out to be a great feature, so simple but the experience is brilliant.

I decided to build this app on my website as it meant I already had a framework and hosting in place, in addition I would be using an SDK I had been developing for the Crunch API both of these meant the development turned into something very simple that was complete in about an hour.

The pertinent code can be found in this gist and is designed for the laravel framework. This does require access to the SDK which hasn't been publicly released yet but this shouldn't be long.

This version of the app doesn't include any authorisation and it assumes you already have an oauth token for yourself. For my purposes this was all I needed but I am going to release another version of the app shortly which anyone can use. - And here it is! Crunch Expenses App

The final nicity which finished this project off is the add to homescreen option which in chrome at least turns a web page into a mini app, when loaded via the homescreen link the app will load without any of the normal chrome browser elements such as the address bar.

In conclusion I am really pleased with this project, it didn't take long and the result was something that will hopefully be useful. Time will tell if I switch over to using this app or if I go back to Snap.