Expense Management System using MERN Stack

Last Updated : 23 Jul, 2025

In this article, we’ll walk through the step-by-step process of creating a Expense Management System using the MERN (MongoDB, ExpressJS, React, NodeJS) stack. This project will showcase how to set up a full-stack web application where users can add their budget and put daily expenses that get deducted from the budget.

Output Preview: Let us have a look at how the final output will look like.

👁 addBudget

Create New Budget Page

Prerequisites:

Approach to Create Expense Management System using MERN:

List all the requirement for the project and make the structure of the project accordingly.
Chooses the required dependencies and requirement which are more suitable for the project.

For Backend:-

Create a directory named model inside root directory.
Create javascript files named User.js and Budget.js in the model directory for collection schema.
Then create another route directory inside root(Backend folder).
Create javascript files named auth.js and budget.js to handle API request.

For Frontend:-

Create a components directory inside root directory( Budget_Tracker folder).
Create four file of javascript inside components folder namely Expense.jsx, Home.jsx, RegistrationForm.jsx and LoginForm.jsx.

Steps to Create the Backend Server:

Step 1: Create a directory for project

mkdir Backend
cd Backend

Step 2: Create a server using the following command in your terminal.

npm init -y

Step 3: Install the required dependencies in your server using the following command.

npm i express mongoose cors nodemon jsonwebtoken

Project Structure:

👁 Capture4

The package.json file of backend will look like:

"dependencies": {
 "bcryptjs": "^2.4.3",
 "cors": "^2.8.5",
 "express": "^4.18.2",
 "jsonwebtoken": "^9.0.2",
 "mongoose": "^8.2.0"
}

Example: Below is an example of server for creating budget tracker with MERN Stack.

Start your server using the following command.

npm start

Steps to Create the Frontend Application:

Step 1: Initialized the React App with Vite and installing the required packages

npm create vite@latest -y
->Enter Project name: "Frontend"
->Select a framework: "React"
->Select a Variant: "Javascript"
cd Frontend
npm install

Project Structure:

👁 frontend

The package.json file of frontend will look like:

 "dependencies": {
 "react": "^18.2.0",
 "react-dom": "^18.2.0",
 "react-icons": "^5.0.1",
 "react-router-dom": "^6.22.2"
 },
 "devDependencies": {
 "@types/react": "^18.2.56",
 "@types/react-dom": "^18.2.19",
 "@vitejs/plugin-react": "^4.2.1",
 "eslint": "^8.56.0",
 "eslint-plugin-react": "^7.33.2",
 "eslint-plugin-react-hooks": "^4.6.0",
 "eslint-plugin-react-refresh": "^0.4.5",
 "vite": "^5.1.4"
 }
}