Iron Vizzy Spotlight: Cristina used WriteBackExtreme to Efficiently Track Everyday Finances.
How Cristina made budgeting fun.
Cristina spent months wondering where her money is going. Then she spent months tracking her income and expenses in an excel sheet. Sure, the routine helped her finally see the numbers, but didn’t offer insights into spending patterns. The format did not inspire her to keep going.
When the Iron Vizzy competition at Infotopics | Apps for Tableau came around, it became the perfect opportunity to give that spreadsheet a glow-up. Instead of simple rows and columns, why not create something visual, interactive, and actually fun to use?
This blog walks us through how she built a personal budget tracker that is not only functional but also fun to use. The result is a fully functional application that makes it easy and fun to track expenses.
When a personal challenge becomes a dashboard concept.
Cristina’s goal was to create a dashboard that makes tracking monthly income and expenses easy, and ultimately leads to better budgeting decisions. Her wish was to write new records for money coming in and going out, along with visualizations that update in real time and reflect clearly her financial situation.
Before learning Tableau, Cristina wrote down her expenses in an Excel sheet. By doing so, she formed a clear idea of what metrics were most relevant to her and what information she wanted quick access to. She then translated everything into a more dynamic setup, using Tableau as the main platform. WriteBackExtreme was implemented for adding new records, and SuperTables to display a clear overview of each spending.
The design journey.
For Cristina, who is a visual thinker, the Excel sheet was not practical as it felt too plain and uninteresting. Eventually, she lost motivation to update it daily, and ended up spending one afternoon every week updating the spreadsheet. Therefore, she wanted an application that was interactive, visually appealing, and designed with her needs in mind. Since she couldn’t find something suitable online, she decided to build it herself.
Cristina started with a single dashboard, adding a table overview that contained details of all her expenses. She used SuperTables to create a minimalistic design, and placed it on top of a picture of a receipt. Next, she added several KPIs that displayed the numbers she cared about most, including her latest monthly salary, average monthly spending, and current balance. FInally, a picture was included to alert Cristina whenever her current balance drops below 300 euros.
She had a lot of fun playing around with different layouts, fonts, and styles. She also realized that there were many interesting insights that could be visualized, so she created a second dashboard. This dashboard features native Tableau visualizations that provide a deeper look into her spending habits. The dashboards are interconnected, allowing her to easily switch from one view to the other.
Bringing in WriteBackExtreme for interactivity.
To be able to update the dashboard in real-time, Cristina incorporated WriteBackExtreme. This allowed her to add new expenses directly inside Tableau, making it possible to get rid of the Excel sheet she had been using. The dashboard transformed into a true application and the visuals update instantly with each new data entry.
Learning more than just Tableau skills.
During this project, Cristina learned the basics of building a dashboard in Tableau. She went from knowing nothing about Tableau to building her very own interactive dashboard. She learned everything along the way, from creating visuals to arranging them into a story. And what a story it turned out to be! She uncovered spending patterns that helped her understand her own habits. She learned that she is eating too much junk food.
On the bright side, as a designer, Cristina discovered that she really loves styling dashboards. Tableau became another creative space for her.
A dashboard built to stay.
The end result is something she now uses every day. It clearly shows when, where and how her money is spent, keeping her mindful of her habits. Along the way, she realized she doesn’t actually spend all that much, it’s just that life is expensive!
