Update: The Grocery Tracker website is no longer online.

This year I once again participated in the RailsRumble competition with the goal to build a Rails app in 48 hours. My amazing teammates Arya Asemanfar, Gary Tsang, and Alex Le and I worked together tirelessly to build an application for tracking grocery purchases. The result is Grocery Tracker.

Grocery Tracker

The objective of Grocery Tracker is to make it really easy to visualize how much you are spending on groceries and how your buying habits are changing. For me, it is interesting to see what percent of my grocery purchases are going towards “Snacks & Candy” as well as my historical spending in that category. Grocery Tracker allows me to quickly answer questions like “Am I spending less on snacks now than I was 3 months ago?”.

Start Tracking!

To signup, click “Get Started” on the homepage. Fill out the (poorly styled) registration form to create an account and you will be automatically logged in.

When you login for the first time we create two sample grocery lists for you. The first one has all the ingredients to make a wicked sandwich and the second one is blank. Click on the blank list and play around with entering new items to the list.

After you have entered some data click the “Reports” tab at the top to view graphs of your purchases. The first graph on the reports dashboard is a graph of total spending over time and the smaller graphs beneath display a breakdown of spending by category. The default view is to view a breakdown by day. You may find it more useful to break down your purchases by week, month, and eventually year. To do so, click the respective links in the top right of the page.

iPhone Integration

Grocery Tracker has a minimal iPhone interface for viewing your grocery lists from your phone. This is ideal for reviewing your grocery lists when shopping at the grocery store. We hope to build out the iPhone functionality more in the future.

Alpha, Beta, Gamma?

Keep in mind when using Grocery Tracker that it was developed entirely in 48 hours. Once the deadline passed we were no longer allowed to make changes. There are a few known bugs in the software that we want desperately to fix but are barred from doing so by the rules of the competition. In particular, logging in and out of the application is really rough and you should anticipate strange behavior to crop up.