Minimal

Simplify your savings.

Minimal is a budgeting app designed to make budgeting as easy and painless as possible. We are tired of popups, advertisements, unnecessary features, marketing emails, and monthly subscriptions cluttering our phones and our minds. We wish to simplify your savings by removing redundancy, and providing you with what really matters in a budgeting app:

Fast, painless monthly budget creation with useful analytics.

Give us feedback!

Please email us at jonsteele.dev@gmail.com if you notice any bugs or want any features added.

Test Minimal Out!

This app can be accessed at minimalbudget.ca for users, and will be deployed to the Google Play Store and App Store.

User Guide

Logging In

To log into Minimal, users can either opt to "Continue as Guest," or register as a new account. For testing purposes, "Continue as Guest" is adequate, however, if you wish for your budget data to persist, please create an account by clicking "Register," and then filling out your account information.

Budgets

Creating a Budget

After logging in, users can create a budget by pressing the "+" icon on screen. Users will be met with an "Add a new Budget" popup, where they can enter their desired name of the budget.

Editing a Budget

Users can edit their budgets by pressing the name of the budget from their home menu. This will bring up the Budget view, allowing users to manipulate and analyze their budget.

Adding an Expense or Income

To add a new expense or income stream, users can press the blue "+" button in the bottom right-hand corner. This will bring up a popup screen, where users can specify all necessary data on the new transaction. This data includes categorizing the transaction as an income or expense, the name of the transaction, as well as the numerical value of the data.

Deleting an Expense or Income

To delete an Expense or Income, users can swipe horizontally on the desired item. This will immediately remove it from the budget.

Editing an Expense or Income

To edit an Expense or Income, users can press and hold on the desired item. This will bring up a popup window that allows them to change the name and value of the item.

Analyzing a Budget

Minimal offers two different ways of analyzing a budget: The real-time Pie Chart, which shows percentages of allocated expenses, as well as an Investment Calculator.

Pie Chart

The Pie chart can be seen on the top left of a budget, and will automatically populate with data and color as the user inputs their expenses. If you wish to view the percentage of allocated expenses, you can press and hold the slice of the desired expense.

Investment Calculator

The Investment Calculator is a tool used to calculate compound interest on your investments. To use the Investment Calculator, press the icon on the top right of the budget screen.

Inside the Investment Calculator, there are four different fields to input your data.

  1. Interest Rate: This is the average yearly interest rate of your investments.
  2. Years: This is how far into the future you would like to project your investments.
  3. Percentage of Net Income Invested: This is the percentage of the net income from your budget that you would like to invest.
  4. Initial Investments: This is how much money you start off with invested in the simulation.

After all of these fields have been correctly set up, the user can now view how their finances change over time by pressing and holding, or hovering over the graph above.

The purpose of this calculator is to give users a sense of how their interest on investments increases exponentially over time, as well as provide an estimation of where their finances will end up years into the future.

Wishlist

To view your wishlist, go back to the first screen you see after you login. This is the page where you create and manage different budgets. Here, you can press the "list" icon in the top right-hand corner of the blue bar, next to your "profile" icon.

Inside your wishlist, press the blue "+" button to add a wishlist item. Items have a name and price. The "get rid of" field is designed to make users more mindful of the flow of items in their household because you can't keep filling a room with stuff forever. For instance, one might list "New T-Shirts" as their item, 30 for the price, and "Old worn-out hoodies" under the "get rid of" field.