HomeFinance Application – User’s guide
Table of contents
- Introduction
- HomeFinance at a glance
- Login page
- “Your Accounts” page
- Transactions page
- Resetting your data back to Installation settings
- Starting / Stopping the HomeFinance application
- Issues you may encounter
1. Introduction
The HomeFinance application is very easy to use. It has been purposely designed to only have 3 pages, which is all that is needed for budding test analysts to learn all the basics of not only Selenium WebDriver, but also to aid the learning of basic test concepts, SQL and even API testing, all of which will be introduced to this website at a later date.
This “How to use…” step-by-step guide will give you a brief look at how the application works. By “playing around” with the app, you will get a better understanding as to how it can be tested.
The app may not be how you would have designed it and it may have some functionality that doesn’t work as you would expect, and this is okay! As a software test analyst it is your job to test it, warts and all…you may even find bugs, which again is okay, as this is all part of the testing process.
PS. If you do find any bugs, please do let me know by messaging me via the Contact Me form 🙂 !
2. HomeFinance at a glance
HomeFinance is…yep, you’ve guessed it, a mini home finance application! Somewhere where you can view a list of predefined accounts and record financial transactions against those accounts, allowing you to enter, view, modify and even delete transactions.
If you have followed the HomeFinance Installation guide, you will have loaded default login details, predefined accounts and some opening transactions for each account.
The application’s 3 pages are:
- Login page
- Accounts page
- Transactions page
Stopping the application
Please Note: It is advisable, once finished with the application, to close it down via the Command Prompt, please see the “closing down the HomeFinance application” section, below.
3. Login page
This release of HomeFinance will allow login only, you will not be able to register a user, as such you will need to login with the following default details.
The default login is:
- Name: foo10
- Password: foo10
4. “Your Accounts” page
The accounts page displays the 3 predefined accounts that have been set up in the HomeFinance Installation guide. These cannot be changed in this version of the application, except by using SQL (which will be addressed in later tutorials).
The 3 accounts being:
- Cash account
- Savings account
- VISA (Credit Card) account
By clicking on the account name or balance, you will be taken into the respective account transactions.
5. Transactions page
The transaction page will have the same format for all accounts:
- The menu will have a link to accounts (where you can can go back to your accounts list) and logoff
- The New Transaction section is not only for adding single new transactions, split transactions, but also for maintaining (deleting and modifying) them as well, which is explained below
- The account you are in, will be displayed next to New transaction and Account transactions
“New transaction” section
This is where you can enter new transactions and modify or delete them.
To complete a new transaction, enter details in the following fields. Fields marked with an asterisk are mandatory, except for Out and In, where one or the other must be entered.
Once the fields have been entered correctly, then you can click Save to save the transaction, which will be displayed in the Account Transactions (Visa) section of the page.
To start a new transaction, click on the date field:
- * Date
- Select your date. Which can be entered manually or using the drop down
- * Payee
- This is an open format field, where you can enter any Payee name
- * Category
- Your category is chosen from a predefined Drop Down list. By entering the first letter of your category, the Drop Down list will move to the category starting with that letter
- Description
- This is an open format field, where you can enter anything
- Out
- This field represents your outgoings. Either an Out amount or In amount MUST be entered. If both are entered, then a pop up message will be displayed
- In
- This field represents your income amounts. Either an Out amount or In amount MUST be entered. If both are entered, then a pop up message will be displayed
- Split?
- This field is clicked when the transaction needs to be split between more than one category. Please see below for more detail
- Remainder
- This field displays the remainder of the transaction after the last amount has been entered. Please see below for more details
“Split?” field
Some domestic transactions will be split between categories, e.g. a supermarket visit may see you buy some groceries for £20, which would go under Weekly shopping, and perhaps saucepans for £30, which would go under House: Contents, whilst being on the same receipt. To allow for this, HomeFinance gives you an option to split a transaction, as follows:
- Enter the Date, Payee and Out amount (which is the amount of the supermarket receipt / bill (£50)). There is no need to enter the category, as this will be entered for the separate split transactions:
- Click on the New Line button. A new line will be displayed below the main transaction line:
- On this new line, enter the Weekly Shopping transaction and click New Line. You should now see another new line appear, where you need to enter the House: Contents transaction:
- Click the Save button and you will then see the Split transaction displayed in the Account Transactions (Visa) section of the page:
“Remainder” field
The Remainder field is just a field to help show how much is left once you have entered a Split transaction line.
We can use the above example of a supermarket visit to also explain the Remainder field.
In the example, we entered a main transaction line of £50, which is the amount for the supermarket receipt. When we moved off the Out field, a remainder of £50 will have been displayed.
Now…when we create a New Line and enter an amount of £20 and move away from the field (perhaps by pressing New Line again) then the Remainder for that line will show £30. Once the last transaction is entered with an amount of £30 and we have moved away from the field, then the remainder for that line will be reduced to £0.
NOTE: If you try to Save the Split transaction and the Remainder is not zero, then a pop up message will be displayed asking you to adjust your transactions.
Delete button
If a transaction needs deleting from the Account Transactions section list, then you just need to click the Edit button next to the transaction, this will then display the transaction in the New Transaction section:
- Edit button has been clicked for Joe’s supermarket transaction and now the transaction is displayed in the New Transaction section, ready to be amended or deleted:
- To delete the transaction, click on the checkbox:
- Once the checkbox shows a “tick”, then the Delete button can be clicked to delete the transaction. Once done, the transaction will disappear from the Account transaction section
This deletion process can also be used for Split transactions, where only certain transaction lines need to be deleted.
Reset button
The Reset button is purely for clearing the New Transaction section down. So if you have entered a transaction or clicked an Edit button by mistake, then just click Reset and the fields will be cleared.
“Account Transactions” section
This section displays all the transactions that have been entered and modified in the New Transaction section.
Select dates
At the top of the section is a function where the dates can be modified to only display account transactions between the From and To dates. This being particularly handy if you have many, many years worth of data.
Once the dates have been selected, then ensure you click Set Dates to only transactions between the new dates.
Note: These dates will then be saved for all accounts being displayed. So if you go out of the Visa account and then display the Savings account and you wish to display transactions between different dates, then you will need to change the dates and, again, click Set Dates
Edit button
The Edit button works as described above.
Reconcile
To reconcile a transaction, it is just by simply clicking the checkbox alongside the transaction you wish to reconcile and to unreconcile…just click it again 🙂
6. Resetting your data back to Installation settings
Once you have played around with the HomeFinance app and wish to set the data back to what it was when you had finished the Installation, then just re-run the “homefinancesystemtest – SQL data load – V02.00.txt” statements by cutting and pasting as per section “7. Load the Application Database data: Load data into the Database” in the HomeFinance Installation guide
7. Starting / Stopping the HomeFinance application
It is good to stop the HomeFinance app before either closing the Command Prompt (where the app was started) or shutting down your machine / PC, otherwise, you will get an error when you attempt to start it up again. However, it’s easy enough to fix if you forget, please see the next section.
The HomeFinance application is started as per the HomeFinance Installation guide, section “9. Run the application”.
To stop the application you need to:
Go into the Command Prompt (where the app was started) and press keys Ctr + C on your keyboard, You will then be presented with “Terminate batch job (Y/N)?”, just press Y and the application will stop:
8. Issues you may encounter
Error: when attempting to start HomeFinance app:
- Error message in Command Prompt as below, “This application is already running (or delete C:\homefinance-V02.00-SystTest\bin\RUNNING_PID file)”
Fix:
- You will just need to go into the applications bin directory, as below and delete the “RUNNING_PID” file and then attempt to start the application again…and all should be okay!
