Jaa

Building a community debt tracker webapp

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Having built webapps in Java and PHP, I have been curious about ASP.NET. So I decided to teach myself some basic ASP.NET programming by building a useful webapp. A common problem that I've faced going for dinners/movies/shopping with other single friends is splitting bills and keeping track of who owes who how much. It is typical in the plastic money era for us not to have any cash on ourselves. So when they bring the check it is quite tedious to request it being charged to 8 different credit cards with varying amounts. We end up with just one or two of us paying on behalf of others who try to remember the small debts they owe. Three or four such transactions per week and an ever growing social network of friends makes tracking these debts pretty hard.

So I built a webapp called 'Paisa' (hindi for 'Money') to try to solve this problem. Members can charge other members the amounts owed and clear payments received. They can also split a bill among multiple payers with custom ratios. Transactions added send an automatic e-mail to the people involved.

It is a pretty simple app that runs on ASP.NET and uses SQL Server 2005 (express edition should be fine) as backend. It uses Database Mail, a feature of SQL Server 2005 for queuing e-mail messages and delivering them via an SMTP server.

If you think this is handy, send me an e-mail and I can give you the source code so that you can customize it for yourself.

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