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?
We interviewed three people:* 22 y/o male, MIT Grad Student
with regard to how they track their spending and finances, in order to find out what the prospective users would want.
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
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.
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
The expected user in all cases is someone who still keeps physical receipts for various reasons, and would prefer not to.
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.
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.
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The following are the basic functions that the application will perform.
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.
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.
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.