Bean Counter – financial management for freelancers
Driven by the excitement and the buzz surrounding web apps like Basecamp and Mint – I decided to write my own web app.
This app (still in development) will help small time freelancers manage their finances so much more effectively.
Feature set
Financial management software is a crowded market so I must be worried that this product won’t sell. Well I’m not worried – this app has several key selling features that put it above the competition:
- users can email invoices/quotes
- clients of that user can login and view new and previous quotes/invoices
- users can manage their outgoings/expenses and easily see their financial state
Lessons learnt
Producing this web app myself has taken discipline and has taken my PHP code to a new level. Everything has been written with excellence in mind a – total quality approach to coding if you will :)
This is a very exciting time for me, I fully expect this venture to be full of surprises, twists and turns. It’s not my only idea and I fully believe there is a huge market for the type of smart yet simple software that 37signals have pioneered.
MVC
MVC stands for Model-View-Controller and that’s how Bean Counter is programmed – well that’s how I’ve tried my best to code it! It’s allowed me to cut down on the excessive files and folders and structure the code in such a way that will be easy to extend in the future.
Comments, comments and more comments
I think code can be beautiful and creating code that was structured and well commented was a major goal for Bean Counter – although I plan to host Bean Counter accounts myself (or do I? – hmmm still haven’t decided, I still want anyone who gets their hands on the code-base to be able to understand and extend it.
My own mini-framework
All my projects now run on my own mini-framework, and Bean Counter is no different. My framework is a simple set of PHP classes which allows me to get projects moving quickly without worrying about copying and pasting myself into a state of boredom.
