Tardis Bank – online pocket money banking for parents and kids

My son Leo (age 8) and I, that us on the right, have a bit of a pocket money problem. He’s supposed to get £2.00 every week, paid on Sunday. He has a Tardis shaped piggy bank, into which he’s supposed to put the £2.00. When he wants to buy something, he’s supposed to get the cash and take it to the shop.

The thing is, I’m a complete scatter brain and often forget to pay the weekly £2.00. Leo is also very spontaneous in his purchasing habits and will often decide he wants to buy something, but has forgotten to bring along his pocket money. In that situation, I buy whatever it is he wants and tell him that I will deduct it from next week’s pocket money…. which I then promptly forget.

We frequently have long discussions about how many weeks have gone past since his last payment and what I’ve bought on his behalf in the meantime. We loose all track of his real pocket money balance.

Regular pocket money is an important financial education for Leo. He needs to learn how to manage money, but without any proper accounting it just ends up being an arbitrary and irregular hand-over of cash and he learns nothing, except how to beg effectively.

These days most people don’t keep their money under the mattress. I use my bank’s online banking web site to manage my finances. What Leo needs is something similar for his pocket money. Once I started to think about our requirements I realised that it would be pretty straightforward to put together a simple web application. There’s also no reason why I couldn’t offer it to anyone who wanted something similar. A simple sign-on system, an account with a list of transactions and a simple payment schedule is all it needs.

Putting Tardis Bank together has been a great opportunity to play with some new technology. I’ve been wanting to have an experiment with the whole NoSQL thing, and RavenDb in particular for quite a while now, not to mention MVC3 Beta. So far the Raven experience has been very nice. Everything works out of the box, and it really makes putting together this kind of site friction free. Not having to worry about database schemas and the whole object-relational thing is very liberating.

I’m planning to present Tardis Bank at £5App here in Brighton next Tuesday, so it’s got to be live and working by then. In the meantime, there’s a holding page:

http://tardisbank.com/

And a GitHub repository for the code:

http://github.com/mikehadlow/Suteki.TardisBank

If you’ve got a spare minute, please check it out and let me know what you think. Any help, especially with the RavenDb usage patterns and the design stuff which I am awful at, would be much appreciated.