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How I Built a No Code Laundry Card Tracker in Coda

Solving my own needs without writing a single line of code.

When my partner and I moved to NYC from Madrid last year we knew we'd have many challenges. Finding an apartment, adjusting to daily life or settling into a new job were all expected. Keeping track of how much we were spending on laundry and the balance on our laundry card... was very much not. As far as adjustments go, it's admittedly a small one, but I'd gone down to the laundry room one too many times only to find there was no money left on the card. I needed a solution. (As an aside: we didn't expect to have our in-unit washer be one of the things we'd miss most about our life in Madrid. I guess this is adulting?)
Because there is pretty much an app for everything and this seems like a prevalent enough problem, I searched online for existing solutions. Surely it was enough of a nuisance for somebody to have hacked something together? Turns out I was wrong (or at least I couldn't find anything). If I wanted this, I was going to need to build it myself.
As product manager, this situation felt familiar. I had a user (me) and a clearly identified problem (tracking and managing the balance on a laundry card between two people). I also had a rough list of needs the solution would have to solve. Specifically:
Displaying how much money was on the card
Subtracting money from the balance when doing a washer or dryer load
Adding to the balance when refilling the card
Allowing both of us to manage it

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