Our family's allowance policy is that the kids get a dollar a day by default, but allowance is withheld for bad behavior. This app enables easy updating of transactions as well as allowing the kids to self-check how much money is in their account.

This is my first rails project so I'm using it to learn rails too.

You can deploy locally for testing:

bin/rails server

I use heroku to deploy to the public cloud:

git push heroku main

After a DB migration, do

heroku run rails db:migrate
heroku restart

The restart seems to be important.. until you do that things are not in a good state.

You can also deploy locally via heroku:

heroku local

You need to add an account for each kid. There is no UI interface for this, so here's how to do it:

bin/rails console (or heroku run rails console)
account = Account.new(name:'Remi')
account.save

You also need to add an admin user so that you can edit transactions. Anyone who knows the login/password will be able to edit the transactions, so it's important the kids don't know it.

user = User.new(login:'x', password:'xxx',active:true,approved:true,confirmed:true)
user.save

If the transaction rollbacks, you can do user.errors to see what's wrong.

Once you access the app, go to the kid's account. Sign in with the admin credentials to access the "New transaction" and "New incrementor" controls. First, add a new incrementor. Give it a start date, an increment per day (e.g., 1), and a comment. That will be the default allowance given every day.

If you ever want to boost allowance, or deduct allowance when the kids decide to buy something, add a new transaction.

But if you want to withhold allowance, add a new transaction and check the box for "withhold increment today." In this case the amount is ignored.

There is an intentional subtle difference between withholding the increment for a day and simply having a transaction for -$1 in the way it shows up in the "virtual transactions" list. I want the kids to understand that allowance is withheld as a consequence for bad behavior, instead of earning an allowance by default which is then canceled out with a penalty deduction.

I generated the Account and Transaction models out of order, so Transaction was missing a reference to account. So here's how to fix that. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4338973/adding-a-model-reference-to-existing-rails-model/16354869#16354869

rails generate migration AddAccountRefToTransaction account:references