Build a real business application
Build a secure Expense Tracker that records income and expenses, calculates balances, and protects each user’s financial records.
This is Workbook 01 in the Prompt to Profit™ Software Workbook Series. It is a complete standalone learning project. You can begin here without owning or completing another workbook in the series.
Who this workbook is for
- Complete beginners who want to build useful software with AI
- Small business owners who want to understand how custom business applications are created
- Students and career changers building practical portfolio projects
- People who prefer clear, guided projects instead of disconnected coding exercises
- Learners using Notepad and a browser rather than a professional development environment
What you will build
- Build a responsive public website with login and registration links
- Connect a browser-based application securely to Supabase
- Create registration, email verification, login, protected pages and logout
- Design a transactions table protected by Row Level Security
- Add, view, edit and delete income and expense records
- Calculate total income, total expenses and the current balance
- Search, filter and sort transactions
- Test record ownership with two separate user accounts
- Deploy the completed application to Netlify
What you will learn
- Understand how HTML, CSS and JavaScript work together
- Use complete AI build prompts without relying on code snippets
- Save and retrieve authenticated user data
- Test loading, empty, success and error states
- Present a complete financial software project in a portfolio
Your chapter-by-chapter path
- Building the Public Website
- Connecting to Supabase
- Building the Authentication System
- Building the Transactions Database
- Building the Expense Tracker Dashboard
- Viewing Transactions
- Editing and Deleting Transactions
- Making the Dashboard More Powerful
- Final Testing and Project Completion
Tools used in the workbook
- HTML for page structure
- CSS for layout, colours and responsive design
- Vanilla JavaScript for application behaviour
- Supabase for authentication, database storage and security
- ChatGPT as your AI software development partner
- Notepad for creating and updating complete files
- A modern browser for testing
You do not need VS Code, Node.js, React or a JavaScript framework.
Designed for careful beginner progress
Every lesson explains what you are building, why it matters, what to prepare, the complete Build Prompt, what AI should return, how to save the files and how to test the completed capability.
The workbook also includes checkpoints, common beginner mistakes, behind-the-scenes explanations, software-design questions and a clear summary of what you learned.
Security is part of the project
You will not build a demonstration that exposes every user's records. The workbook teaches authenticated ownership checks, Supabase Row Level Security and two-account privacy testing so you can verify that one user cannot access another user's information.
Learner support included
- A visual glossary of recurring terms
- Backup instructions before replacing complete files
- A troubleshooting checklist
- A reusable error log
- Code-reading questions after major capabilities
- Final testing and live deployment guidance
- Portfolio description, reflection questions and extension challenges
Workbook details
- Format: Protected digital PDF
- Length: 344 pages
- Difficulty: Beginner
- Estimated completion time: 10–15 hours
- Series: Prompt to Profit™ Software Workbook Series
- Produced by: Tochukwu Tech and AI Academy
Work at your own pace
The estimated time is a guide, not a deadline. Complete the lessons in order, test every important capability and stop to correct problems before moving forward. By the end, you will have both a working application and a clearer understanding of how complete software is planned, built, secured, tested and published.