Hanu Society Management and Apps
I live in a small apartment. There are about 18 flats in our apartment.
Managing the expenses and finances of a small apartment is is also not simple. How and where do you track all your expenses and revenues ?
There are some apratment management SaaS solutions but all of them charge $$. Some that are free - dont provide the key functionality like accounting and financial reporting.
So, I decided to develop a small app for managing Our Apartment.
My motto was to: - Make society management easy and hassle free - Make society management and accounting affordable and free for all
Features
Key features are: - Society Management and accounting solution for small and independent Apartments, Gated Communities and Co-operative Housing Societies. - Our Apartment is intuitive, user friendly and extremely easy to use - We provide premium features like accounting free for all ! - Manage member access through the admin control. Give access to create expenses to authorized members only and view financial reports to all members - Society Accounting: Automated Billing, Track all your Expenses, Generate all Financial Statements, Reports for Auditing. Get an overview of pending payments and projected balance. - Get notifications when payments are due and get reports via email. - Fully customizable: Customize the application according to your needs and preferences. Customization is very easy and intutive
Architecture
I started developing this around in 2017-18. At that point in time I was more comfortable with PHP (rather than JavaScript).
So, I chose PHP based user management framework for developing this application.
I am hosting this application on a Linux Virtual Machine.
Architecture Components
- PHP for Server side application
- MySQL for Database
- CRON Jobs for background job schedulingthis
Costs
Since this is running on a Linux VM - I am incurring a recurring cost of VM. All other software components are open source and free :)
Frameworks
Android App
I also developed an Android app so that the users can access the solution from a mobile.
The Android app is very lean and doesnt have any business logic. The app works with the REST APIs exposed by the backend. The app does not store any offline data for processing.
Source Code
Refactoring Plans
I was developing this in 2017-18 and at that time my experience with GCP was very limited. After developing Finance Planner app on GCP and with zero cost architecture, I feel more confident and I am planning to refactor this and migrate it to GCP.
The main reasons are: - Zero cost on GCP - Less learning curve (Upgrading userfrosting is not very easy) - Linux server maintennce (regular patches, certificate issues, PHP upgrades)