Online money management.

[Dentafrice,]

I am currently working on a system that manages your money.

Its basically just for me right now.

Say I have $100, I put that into the system.

Every purchase I make gets deducted out of that.

The way I was thinking of making deductions was through my cell phone via text message.

I could send a text to [email protected] with the body:

20-Gas

PHP will monitor that E-Mail and get the body of it and explode it by the "-"

it will subtract $20 from that ammount and insert it into the DB with the reason for the deduction being: "Gas".

Anyone have any ideas?

[Luckyrare]

Nice idea but if your on the road wouldnt you just be better downloading the data before you go then uploading it from your PDA when you get back?

The only time I could see if really useful is for like a company, where all the staff can send in these charges.

I am interested to see this working anyway x]

[Splinter]

1. Will people really use this over excel and any other spreadsheet software?
2. Unless you are planning to write somekind of text software I dont believe there is any kind out there which allows you to do this kind of thing.
3. If there is then there is usually a 50p charge so will the user need to keep texting this service to report that payment?

[Dentafrice,]

Its not for users, its for me.

Its for businesses/personal uses.

I used a BETA copy of this recently for a client. He was having a "VBS" in his community and all the teachers texted in what they bought for the VBS which showed the director their remaining budget.

[Splinter]

Ah well if its just for you then it becomes alot simpler.This would be easy enough really but are you using an outside email adress such as msn or gmail??

[Dentafrice,]

Nope, on my server using PHP's IMAP controls and a CRON job

[Splinter]

Ah, well thats simple then. Otherwise you would find yourself having to write an email client . Good luck.

[Dentafrice,]

Yeah its not really that hard, but it is quite useful I have found.

I will add this to my list. Right now I am working on Cabtech Design

[LeftForDead]

Im confused is this gonna be like paypal?:s

[Dentafrice,]

No no, say you have $165. You input into the system that ammount.

Say you are at the mall and you bought a CD for $15.

You send a text to: [email protected] with the text message saying:
15-CD

Which deducts $15 off that ammount for the CD.

Then you can text to [email protected] with the text message saying:
BALANCE

And it will message you back saying $150