My friend Joe Edelman recently introduced me to Meteor, a javascript based web application framework.  I decided a great way to learn it would be to write a tool to help me keep track of our household’s finances, with an eye towards bigger systems.

So I created Balance, an open source tool to keep track of shared finances for groups.  You can create groups that are public, require approval to join or are invitation-only, and add transactions, from simple one to one payments to complicated reimbursements.   The program keeps a running total of who owes money or who is owed money.

Before now I was spending quite a bit of time with complicated spreadsheets to determine who owed what in my household.  It’s much simpler now.

This is my first open source project, and I’m getting a handle on code repositories and such.  I hope others can improve on it!  Please let me know what you think.

How is the picture above related?  It’s describes how my brain sometimes feels when working on a project like this!