Overview

biweeklybudget is a responsive (mobile-friendly) Flask/SQLAlchemy personal finance application, specifically targeted at budgeting on a biweekly basis. This is a personal project of mine, and really only intended for my personal use. If you find it helpful, great! But this is provided as-is; I’ll happily accept pull requests if they don’t mess things up for me, but I don’t intend on working any feature requests or bug reports at this time. Sorry.

The main motivation for writing this is that I get paid every other Friday, and have for almost all of my professional life. I also essentially live paycheck-to-paycheck; what savings I have is earmarked for specific purposes, so I budget in periods identical to my pay periods. No existing financial software that I know of handles this, and many of them have thousands of Google results of people asking for it; almost everything existing budgets on calendar months. I spent many years using Google Sheets and a handful of scripts to template out budgets and reconcile transactions, but I decided it’s time to just bite the bullet and write something that isn’t a pain.

Intended Audience: This is decidedly not an end-user application. You should be familiar with Python/Flask/MySQL. I personally don’t recommend running this on anything other than your own computer that you physically control, given the sensitivity of the information. I also don’t recommend making the application available to anything other than localhost, but if you do, you need to be aware of the security implications. This application is not designed to be accessible in any way to anyone other than authorized users (i.e. if you just serve it over the web, someone will get your account numbers, or worse).

Note: Any potential users outside of the US should see the documentation section on Currency Formatting and Localization; the short version is that I’ve done my best to make this configurable, but as far as I know I’m the only person using this software. If anyone else wants to use it and it doesn’t work for your currency or locale, let me know and I’ll fix it.

Requirements

Note: Alternatively, biweeklybudget is also distributed as a Docker container. Using the dockerized version will eliminate all of these dependencies aside from MySQL, which you can run in another container.

• Python 3.7+ (currently tested and developed with 3.14).

• Python VirtualEnv and pip (recommended installation method; your OS/distribution should have packages for these)

• MySQL, or a compatible database (e.g. MariaDB). biweeklybudget uses SQLAlchemy for database abstraction, but currently specifies some MySQL-specific options, and is only tested with MySQL.

• To use the automated Plaid transaction downloading functionality, a valid Plaid account.

Installation

It’s recommended that you run from the Docker image, as that’s what I do. If you don’t want to do that, you can also install in a virtualenv using Python 3.14:

mkdir biweeklybudget
python3.14 -mvenv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install biweeklybudget

License

biweeklybudget itself is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3. This is specifically intended to extend to anyone who uses the software remotely over a network, the same rights as those who download and install it locally. biweeklybudget makes use of various third party software, especially in the UI and frontend, that is distributed under other licenses. Please see biweeklybudget/flaskapp/static in the source tree for further information.

biweeklybudget includes a number of dependencies distributed alongside it, which are licensed and distributed under their respective licenses. See the biweeklybudget/vendored directory in the source distribution for further information.

Attributions

The logo used for biweeklybudget makes use of the wonderful, free Ledger icon by Eucalyp on FlatIcons: Ledger icons created by Eucalyp - Flaticon.