Apollo
Internal expense tracking tool for Devonic. Categorized spending records, monthly summaries, and budget oversight for the company's day-to-day financial operations.
Stack
The Problem
Running a small LLC means tracking expenses without the overhead of enterprise accounting software — and without the unreliability of a shared spreadsheet.
Devonic’s expenses fall into predictable categories: SaaS subscriptions, cloud infrastructure, contractor payments, equipment, and travel. Apollo tracks all of them in a structured, queryable format that makes monthly financial reviews a ten-minute task instead of a ninety-minute spreadsheet archaeology project.
How It Works
Expenses are entered with four fields: amount, category, date, and an optional note. The category system is fixed and deliberately small — broad enough to be meaningful, narrow enough to stay manageable. No custom tagging schemes that accumulate cruft over months and stop making sense.
The dashboard surfaces what matters:
Monthly spend by category: where the budget went in each period, visualized as a bar chart so anomalies are immediately visible.
Budget vs. actual: a running comparison against monthly targets per category. If infrastructure spend is trending 40% over in week two, that surfaces now — not at month close.
Trailing 12-month view: seasonal patterns and year-over-year trends. Useful for planning annual SaaS renewals and forecasting contractor needs.
Pending items: flagged expenses awaiting a decision — a subscription renewal coming due, an invoice pending approval, a payment not yet confirmed.
Why Not QuickBooks or a Spreadsheet
Enterprise accounting tools are built for invoicing, tax compliance, payroll, and regulatory reporting. Devonic has an accountant for that. What was needed was operational visibility — a dashboard that answers “where is the company’s money going this month?” without exporting a CSV and opening Excel.
On the other end, a shared spreadsheet has no validation, no visual aggregation, and breaks the moment someone pastes the wrong format or sorts without selecting the full range.
Apollo occupies the space between: structured enough to be reliable, simple enough to stay maintained by a team that has other things to do.
Stack
Vue.js dashboard with Chart.js for the budget visualization components. Express API with PostgreSQL — expenses live in a simple normalized table with a category enum and a date-range index for fast monthly aggregations. Monthly summaries are pre-computed on write to keep dashboard loads instant, even as the expense log grows over years of use.