Finley Analytics
Full-Stack Financial Analytics & Budgeting Platform
Finley Analytics is a full-stack personal finance and analytics platform featuring JWT authentication, RESTful aggregation pipelines, and interactive spending telemetry. It was built to make income, expenses, and cash-flow patterns readable without a heavy client-side data layer.
Challenge
Personal finance data is fragmented across accounts and categories. The platform needed secure authentication, a clean API for income and expense records, and fast summaries that made spending patterns visible without shipping large datasets to the browser for computation.
Architecture
A React client consumes an Express REST API backed by MongoDB. JWT protects routes and scopes requests to the authenticated user. MongoDB aggregation pipelines compute monthly totals, category breakdowns, and cash-flow trends on the server; the client renders the results as interactive charts and telemetry.
Key decisions
JWT-based stateless authentication
Token-based auth keeps the API stateless and straightforward to scale across clients.
Aggregation on the server
MongoDB aggregation pipelines compute summaries close to the data, avoiding large client-side reductions.
Chart-first telemetry
Spending patterns are surfaced visually first, with category and time-range breakdowns available for detail.
MERN end to end
One language across the stack kept the API, data model, and UI iterating together during a short build window.
Results
- JWT-secured REST API
- Server-side aggregation pipelines
- Interactive spending telemetry
- MERN stack: MongoDB, Express, React, Node.js