Building a Financial Ledger Application with PHP MVC, MySQL, and Vue JS

Managing financial records and transactions is crucial for any business or individual. In this article, we will explore how to build a financial ledger application using PHP MVC, MySQL for database management, and Vue JS for front-end interactivity.

Setting up the environment

First, let’s set up our development environment by installing PHP, MySQL, and Vue JS. You can download PHP from the official website and install it on your local machine. For MySQL, you can either install it locally or use a cloud-based database service. As for Vue JS, you can use npm to install it globally by running the following command:

npm install -g @vue/cli

Creating the database

Once the environment is set up, we can create a new database in MySQL to store our financial data. We can create a table for transactions with columns such as id, amount, description, and date. We can also create a table for categories with columns such as id and name to categorize the transactions.


CREATE TABLE transactions (
id INT AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
amount DECIMAL(10,2),
description VARCHAR(255),
date DATE
);

CREATE TABLE categories (
id INT AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
name VARCHAR(50)
);


Building the PHP MVC application

Next, we can start building the back-end of our financial ledger application using the PHP MVC architecture. We can create models for transactions and categories to handle database operations, controllers to handle user requests, and views to display data to the user. We can use PHP’s PDO extension to connect to the MySQL database and perform CRUD operations.


// Sample PHP code for connecting to MySQL database
$dsn = 'mysql:host=localhost;dbname=financial_ledger';
$username = 'username';
$password = 'password';
$options = array(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE => PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION);

try {
$db = new PDO($dsn, $username, $password, $options);
} catch (PDOException $e) {
echo 'Connection failed: ' . $e->getMessage();
}


Adding interactivity with Vue JS

Finally, we can use Vue JS to add interactivity to our financial ledger application. We can create components for adding transactions, viewing transactions, and filtering transactions by categories. We can use Vue’s reactivity system to update the front-end whenever new data is added to the database.


// Sample Vue JS code for displaying transactions

Conclusion

By combining PHP MVC, MySQL, and Vue JS, we can build a powerful and interactive financial ledger application. We can easily manage our financial records, add new transactions, and view our financial data in a user-friendly way. This can be a great tool for businesses and individuals to keep track of their finances and make informed financial decisions.