I have a habit of keeping receipts whenever I spend something and keeping a record on an excel spreadsheet. I’ve done it for as long as I’ve had a proper job and it’s been a great way to keep track of how much I’ve spent, but I don’t enjoy using spreadsheets, I’ve never found then super user-friendly.
I came up with an idea while back called Trimm, a pretty, stripped-down way to track expenses. I created it on my own in 2014 and I intentionally made it really social, a bit like Twitter with followers and counts for what things had been spent and although it worked for me, it didn’t work for others. People didn’t what other people to see where their money went. I also spotted a few bugs with it the more I used it which I continually put off. It wasn’t until the app suddenly prevented me from logging in that I thought it was time to recreate it, from scratch.
I told Hannah about my idea and she was really excited to help me and to try out some user interface work which she hasn’t done a whole lot of before. I gave her a few features that I wanted and an overall colour scheme which was all she needed to start working. Throughout the week she showed me her progress and I was always impressed, the use of colour, spacing, and fonts for the four pages she had come with were much better than what I could do and what I had in mind and in turn, inspired me to work on it as well, I didn’t want all her hard work to go to waste.
After about two months of writing code outside of work hours, asking a few developers for help, and sending a lot of support tickets to my web hosting company I eventually came up with a new version of Trimm I am happy to use. Something that is intuitive, user-friendly, and pleasing to the eye. As of this month, I have ditched my excel spreadsheet and use Trimm for all my expenses.
This is the second time Hannah and I have worked on a web-related project (the first one being this website) and it’s always fun to do so. Sharing ideas, collaborating on features, and ultimately focusing our skills towards a common goal. Not many couples have interest and job roles that complement each other, and now with Hannah being freelance means, we can have more time to work on projects together.
Ollie