jyoung90ie/financial-forecaster

A tool which enables the user to forecast current and/or hypothetical financial circumstances into the future.

Financial Scenario Projection

This tool has been created to help you to assess your financial circumstances. It takes your current assets and liabilities (e.g. current account and credit card balances), regular incomes and outgoings, and outputs your financial status at some point in the future (as determined by you).

This can be used to perform 'what-if analysis' on your income and outgoings, for example, if you decide to sign-up for a gym membership, you can see the impact of this on your financial health over X time period.

UX

The UX has been designed to be simple, intuitive, and make the input experience as fluid as possible. Once a user has completed the form atleast once the data will be saved, enabling them to quickly go back and forward between tabs.

The UI was designed using Bootstrap so that I could make use of the responsive framework for my data capture form. CSS transitions were added to give the user a feel for the direction of travel through the data capture process. A visual indicator was also added to the bottom of the form so the user knows where they are in the data capture process.

The net worth chart produced at the end uses the D3.js line path generator with circles overlaid. This was designed to guide the end user to the data points (i.e. the circles), so that when they hover over each a tooltip will be shown that provides further information. This chart is contained within a horizontal scrollable div, enabling it to be viewed correctly on smaller devices.

For example, a user wants to understand what the impact on their savings will be over a 3 year period if they reduce their TV and Internet Bill by 23/month.

• The user populates the form with the following data:

  1. Personal Data, selecting the goal to 'Increase Savings'
  2. Current Assets and Liabilities (i.e. account balances)
  3. Income(s) with frequency (e.g. monthly)
  4. Outgoing(s) with frequency (e.g. weekly) - including the TV and Internet bill at the current price
  5. Submits the data and is presented with a visual representation of their net worth over time

• To then determine the impact of this change in outgoings, the user then does the following:

  1. Clicks the 'Previous' button until they reach the 'Regular Outgoing(s)' tabs
  2. Updates the 'TV and Internet' bill to the new price
  3. Submits the data again and is now presented with their net worth over time
  4. Comparing the outputted values to those outputted at Step 5 gives the impact of reducing this bill

Features

Existing Features

• Dynamic Forms - the user can add and remove input fields to match their requirements (e.g. for accounts)
• One Page Form - the form is one page of HTML and is made to look like seperate pages through the use of CSS and Javascript
• Transitions - CSS transitions are used to improve the user experience and visually indicate the direction of travel
• Progress Indicator - a visual indicator has been placed at the bottom of the form to provide the user with feedback on their progress through the form
• Validation - the form is validated each time the user tries to transition to another tab, and when the user tries to add a new row for data capture (e.g. a new account). This ensures the data inputs are of a minimum standard before processing
• Time-series data - from the user inputs a time-series data array is created over the user specified time period
• Net Worth - the time-series data is used to output the user's net worth information over time. For example the user can determine their net worth at the point-in-time X, not just at the end of the time period.
• Net Worth Chart - Using D3.js a chart is produced showing the evolution of the user's net worth over the time period specified.

Features Left to Implement

• Multiple currencies
• Optional start and end dates for Income/Outgoing(s)
• Additional line charts seperating out the impact of the different outgoing types (e.g. rent, bills, etc.)
• Implement functionality to output the date in which the user will reach their goal, as specified on the first input tab, i.e. to reach a specific savings target/reduce their debt to a specific level

Technologies Used

In this section, you should mention all of the languages, frameworks, libraries, and any other tools that you have used to construct this project. For each, provide its name, a link to its official site and a short sentence of why it was used.

• HTML
• CSS
• Javascript
• Bootstrap v4.3.1: Enabled me to easily create a single page form with helpful UI components.
• Font Awesome v5.11.2: Adds useful icons to make the UX more user friendly and appealing.
• Jasmine v3.5.0: For testing JS functionality to ensure it works as intended.
• JQuery v1.12: Used to add a calendar datepicker to the form.
• D3-tip v0.9.1: Used for creating chart tooltips.
• D3.js v5.12.0: This is used to chart the user's net worth over time

Testing

Jasmine Testing

• Picked up the need to covert '.nodeName' attribute values and comparison strings to lower case to enable comparison logic to be used
• Picked up that the validateNumber regular expression was only allowing positive numbers, some users may not find this intuitive and prefer to input the numbers as negatives. This can then be processed correctly in the background.

Manual Testing

This was tested across multiple browsers and devices, this resulted in some additional challenges:

• I used Chrome as my main development browser but upon testing the JS on Microsoft Edge, I noted that Edge did not have the 'event.target.path' attribute. To resolve this required the discontinuation of 'event.target.path' and creation of a new function (getTargetNodeID)

Deployment

Using GitHub Pages I deployed the website from the Master branch. You can see the deployed website here.

Using the Master branch means that as I make additional commits these will be reflected on the deployed website.

If you wish to run this project locally, you will need to download and install Git to your computer - see here.

Once you have installed Git, you will need to create a folder on your computer and then run the git clone command. A demonstration of this code can be seen below:

mkdir Financial-Forecaster
cd Financial-Forecaster
git clone https://github.com/jyoung90ie/Financial-Forecaster.git

Upon completion open the index.html file within Financial-Forecaster with your preferred browser. The tool will now work without any further user setup.