Bókar
The home accounting system
A personal accounting system?
Bókar is the project that first got me into web development and design back in 2022. It has been a so-called *pet project* of mine ever since, and it is probably the project I have learned the most from. The idea behind Bókar is to gather information from different systems, like bank accounts, pension funds and securities accounts — so that a user can see their whole financial position in one place instead of jumping between different services. The project has gone through several redesigns over the years. Every time I have improved at design or user experience, I have rethought how the system should look and work. The design you see here is therefore far from final. It is only just starting to take shape, and there is still a lot left to develop and refine.
My role
I have handled planning the whole system, designing how it works and looks, as well as building the entire frontend. As things stand today, the project has only reached the frontend stage. I haven't started backend development yet, since the goal has first and foremost been to shape the idea, the user flow and the user interface.
What I learned
This project has probably taught me more than anything else how important it is to plan a project well before you start designing. It is not enough to just think: *I want to see my stocks.* You have to go a step further and ask: *What information do I want to see when I open the stocks page? What actually matters and what is just a side detail?* It has also been very instructive to design solutions around the information that is actually available through Open Banking (PSD2). It is easy to sketch up a beautiful interface in Figma, but a whole different matter when you have to work with the data the banks actually make available. One example is categorizing bank transactions. I needed to find a way to categorize expenses automatically, and there my experience from the payments industry came in handy. I decided to base the categorization partly on MCC codes (*Merchant Category Codes*), which give a good indication of what kind of store or service a transaction relates to. A project like this has taught me that good design is not just about how a system looks, but also about understanding the available data and designing a realistic solution around it.
A fun story
Since Bókar still isn't at the point where I can start talking about all the technical solutions or the problems that came up during development, I'll instead tell the story of how the project came to be. When I was in upper-secondary school and on summer break, I had just finished an accounting course with the best grade I had ever gotten. I was determined to keep practicing over the summer so I wouldn't forget everything before school started again. Then I ran into a fairly simple problem. There was basically no system I could use. I couldn't find any demo systems to practice with, and nothing that let me keep track of my own personal accounting except maybe Excel, which was not at all what I was looking for. After a bit of searching I came across Meniga, but it simply didn't appeal to me. And I mean that literally. I didn't find the design enjoyable, and I also wanted to be able to do various things the system didn't offer. So I decided to do what many developers do when they can't find a solution they like: try to build it myself. I discussed the idea with two friends who ran a hosting company here in Iceland and had experience in web development. They helped me get the first version of Bókar off the ground. Then, one summer, my friend Kría and I decided to start a company around the project and try to turn it into a real product. That company later became Spaugur. A few years later, Bókar still isn't released. The project has changed, grown and evolved far more than we ever realized at the outset. It's maybe a little ironic, but without it Spaugur probably would never have come to be.