We interviewed three people:
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.
The following are the basic functions that the application will perform.
The user will want to easily store digital copies of their physical receipts in order to free them from physically managing them.
The user will want to still keep this method as a reliable source of proof of payment (hard-to-forge, no transcription errors, no omitted info). This feature should, for the user, give all the benefits of keeping physical receipts except without the physical hassle.
The user will most likely have expenditures from various venues/domains. Therefore, they might want to be able to have some way of organizing the different expenditures based on the different places/locations/venues where the expenses where made. In some sense the user wants something that allows them to remember where they spent that money and organize these expenses.
The user will want 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.
Should the app perform basic analysis on the spending history data set, the user will want to see his/her 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. By saving the data, by-default, 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.
Due to time constraints, we decided to work on this as a web application rather than as an Android application. We also decided to narrow our work down to the interface, and not work on the part where it would upload analysis on the user's Dropbox account.