No, we’re not diversifying into a financial services company…

I recently received a letter from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. If you’re reading from the US, they perform many of the same duties as the Internal Revenue Service. Thankfully it wasn’t a demand for unpaid taxes, but a breakdown of how my taxes had been spent over the previous year on things like education and welfare.

For a long time I’ve wanted to quantify my monthly financial accounts, similar to this letter, starting from when I first opened my bank account. Unfortunately in the UK we don’t have a product that works like MINT to do this just yet… but we do have Splunk.

Using Splunk I’ve now started to track my bank account activity, as well other financial service products I’m signed up to. One of these includes Nexonia, an expense tracking application we currently use at Splunk. Here’s how…

Expense Data

To get Nexonia data into Splunk I used the report function. I created a report to grab all my previous expenses, selecting the output as CSV. I then took this CSV and imported it into Splunk. Simple, right?

What Did I Discover?

I’ve spent the most money in the London. Followed by Dubai, and the San Francisco. However, data for London is skewed as most of my airfare is booked out of London.

Accommodation accounts for 35% of my total spend. Airfare is 24%, with all other items all fairly spread between 2% – 4% of total spend.

I spent the most money in July 2014. Almost double the second highest month (October 2014).

There is a correlation between Foursquare check-ins and the total amount of money spent.

The total amount I’ve spent is… a secret!

Try it yourself

If you’re a Nexonia user you can grab my Splunk searches here. Most other services offer a CSV export format functionality and will work just as seamlessly with Splunk.

Where it gets interesting is when other data sources are added to Splunk. I used Foursquare checkins; but what effect does the weather have on spending for example?

I’m going to be using Splunk to track my finances each month to help me budget better. I’ll let you know how I get on!

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Thanks!

David Greenwood