An accountant who works as a private contractor aims to visualize for his clients their spending habits. The accountant has received access to his client's purchases and these purchases come in as a CSV feed at the end of each day from the client's credit card company. The accountant wants to differentiate himself from others, by giving the clients an on demand access to their spending habits. The on-demand access to this information will be provided by a website that the accountant has built for his client.
Google's Chart API is a perfect solution as an on demand provider of this data visualization. With some simple javascript work that accesses the credit card's CSV file and Google's Chart API, the accountant can provide to his client an on demand visualization of up to date spending habits. Below is an example of what that a client might see as his spending habbits. The graph is generated with Google's Chart API.
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chtt=Spending+by+Category&chts=000000,10&chs=500x195&chf=bg,s,ffffff&cht=p3&chd=t:35.78,23.15,15.78,11.57,9.47,2.10,1.05,1.05&chl=Education|Business+Expenses|House|Shopping|Food+&+Dining|Auto+&+Transport|Bills+&+Utilities|Health+&+Fitness&chco=ff6633,00ff66,0066ff,99cccc,00ffff,ffcc33,9900ff,993366
The reason the accountant chose this API for implementation is because its easy to access and code. With some crafty coding the accountant can pull out the spending categories, dollars spent, and their percentages from the CSV file and plug them into the API URL. Since the CSV file will be updated on a daily basis, this allows the accountant to offer to his clients an up to date representation of spending habits without doing any additional work himself (other than setting up the service initially). This API works best because its fast, easy to use, and dependable.
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