Problem Statement

Keeping track of spending is tedious and error prone, especially for cash items where nobody helps you keep a history of your spending. Receipts are still the most common way of tracking spending, are almost universal, and many organizations still use receipts for reimbursement.

Physical receipts  though, are extremely tedious to keep track of and hard to manage. Is there a better way to organize, manage and analyze a user’s weekly spending in order to enable the user to more efficiently handle their finances?

User Analysis

We interviewed three people:

• 22 y/o male, MIT Grad Student
• 22 y/o male, NYU Student
• 22 y/o female, Wellesley Student

with regard to how they track their spending and finances, in order to find out what the prospective users would want.

Interviews

We interviewed three people:

• 22 y/o male, MIT Grad Student** Keeps track of money spent, not in detail, but keeps track of weekly expenses
  • With regards to Cash spending, doesn’t always use cash, but when doing so takes out a specific amount and keep track of how long it takes him to spend it.
  • Keeps track of spending using banking websites.
• 22 y/o male, NYU Student** Keeps track to prevent Credit Card Fraud, not for Analysis or Budgeting
  • Would want application to provide data in the form of excel sheets, for use in other personal finance tools
  • Would use application if it integrated well with other available tools
• 22 y/o female, Wellesley Student** Keeps track of both card and cash spending
  • Tracks them on Excel sheets
  • Categorizes her spending by type (food, rent, school, etc), store name, and price
  • Attempts to do it weekly, but ends up being every other week when the pile of receipts become out of hand

Conclusions

From these interviews, we conclude that people typically use excel to manage and track their finances. We also found that people generally do not closely track and audit their spending.

Proposal

A receipt tracking app that allows you to photograph your receipts and use voice recognition or manual input to record down the quantity spent.

Images of the receipts will be saved in the user’s Dropbox for future reference, as will a consolidated report of the user’s expenditures.

Expenditures could be easily sorted on the spot into different categories

Use Cases

The expected user in all cases is someone who still keeps physical receipts for various reasons, and would prefer not to.

Personal user

This user keeps track of receipts to monitor expenditure and detect credit card fraud. They may use some consumer software (a.l.a mint.com), or they may simply spreadsheet their expenses under excel and cross-reference against their credit/debit charges and cash-withdrawals.

This user currently keeps physical receipts, and every so often (fortnightly) takes the built-up stack of receipts and digitizes them into excel, discarding the physical receipts. The user does not digitize them immediately due to the excessive friction of digitizing each receipt as it appears.

Requirements

1. This user wants convenience above all else. Since it is for their own personal usage, there is no need for the anti-forgery properties provided by physical receipts or scans.
2. Data available in standard format (e.g. Excel) for importing into other tools, such that the user is not forced to immediately abandon his existing workflow to use our tool.
3. Low-friction method for scanning and tracking expenses, in order to encourage maximum compliance and thus accuracy.
4. Basic analytics functionality, so the user can use our app to discover easily common usage patterns and insights without the need for tedious calculations.

Solutions

1. The app will be on their phone, and thus will be constantly available
2. The app will place the data in a variety of formats (xlsx, csv, etc.) directly in the user’s dropbox, making it trivial for him to take it and import it to another program
3. The app will require a minimal number of clicks for each receipt to be digitized
4. The app will provide basic analytics in the data it leaves in the user’s dropbox. For example, .xlsx spreadsheets will have some useful aggregate data already calculated.

Business User

This user keeps track of receipts to monitor expenses on behalf of a business, organization or client. This user keeps receipts both in order to track expenditure as well as to justify his expenses to his client or organization, in order to be properly reimbursed.

This user keeps physical receipts for expenditures on behalf of someone else, and every so often hands off these receipts to the client/organization for their auditing, in exchange for reimbursement.

Requirements

1. This user needs some sort of difficult-to-forge evidence of each expenditure, in order to justify to a third party that the expenses were really made and were justified
2. The evidence have to be easily exportable/transferable to third parties, together with the consolidated data (which has to be in a standard format like Excel), such that the third party can quickly cross-reference the photos with the data to audit the expenditure.
3. The data will have to be kept private, as the third party (business/organization/client) will most definitely not want their expenditure records leaking out to the public!
4. The service must be completely reliable. The user cannot afford to lose the records of his expenditure

Solutions

1. The app will take photos of the receipts. These are essentially equivalent to scans, which are in some places already accepted as proof-of-payment
2. The app will leave the photos taken nicely categorized in folders in the user’s dropbox, making transferring the photos to a third party trivial
3. The app will alert the user when the data has been securely placed in the user’s dropbox, such that he knows when the process has been completed and it is safe to discard the physical receipt. Once in the dropbox, the data is securely backed up and version-ed, making data-loss extremely unlikely.

Task Analysis

The following are the basic functions that the application will perform.

Track - Photo taking

Our app will allow a user to easily photograph and store digital copies of their physical receipts, thus freeing them from having to physically manage them.

As a scan, or photo, of a receipt is in may ways (hard-to-forge, no transcription errors, no omitted info) as good as the original receipt, this will give the user all the benefits of keeping physical receipts except without the physical hassle.

Organize - Categorization

The user will be able to categorize each expenditure immediately at point of spending, according to a list of tags. Users can add/modify the tags to better fit their needs.

This will allow the users to categorize and organize their expenditure as-it-happens, rather than having to do after-the-fact categorization of large batches of receipts. This is beneficial as it is much easier to categorize on the spot, as opposed to 3 weeks later where the memory of the expenditure (not to mention the receipt itself!) would have faded.

This feature needs to be powerful enough that the user will not need to post-process their expenses later to add in data that could not be added on-the-go, and yet fast enough that categorizing your expenses does not get in the way in the moments immediately after a user has made an expenditure.

Analysis - Statistics

Once the user has built up a spending history, the app will perform basic analytics on the data set, allowing the user to view his spending patterns in terms of time, location or the various categories (tags).

It seems likely that many users will not need anything more than the most basic analytics: spending breakdowns by category or by times. As the data is by-default saved as an Excel file, this allows more advanced users to use the spreadsheet capabilities of Excel in order to perform other analysis not pre-packaged with the app.

The most advanced users, who use high-powered financial applications, will be able to simply import the provided Excel file into their preferred financial software to manipulate and analyse. Hence users of all levels will be able to utilize our software.

Possible Features

• Tasklist: For paying off bills or keeping track of future payments. ** Allows users to keep track of future bills or payments they have to pay.
  • As the user pays it off, the amount is added to their statement.
• Debt tracking: Take a photo of a group receipt, along with the quantity you owe as an individual and the person it is owed too
  • I owe you
  • Who owes me

• User expenditure analysis: A detailed analysis of the user’s spending habits during a specific period of time
  • GPS tracking of expenditures by geographic location** Displaying on Google Maps how much the user has spent
  • Time** Graph of how much on average the user spends during the day