That Money App

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, 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

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Keep track - not in detail - dont don’t use cash often, but when he does, he keeps track of how long it takes for him to use the amount he withdrew
Keeps track to prevent fraud - but not for analysis - does not keep track for small amounts - wants analysis in excel if there was one

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• • With regards to Cash spending, doesn’t always use cash, but when takes out a specific amount and keep track of how long it takes me to spend it.
  • Keeps track 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 spendings spending
  • Tracks them on Excel sheets
  • Categorizes her spending by type (food, rent, school, etc), track 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.

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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 usefull 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/transferrable 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

4. The app will alert the user when the data has been securely placed in the user’s dropbox, such that he knowns 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 versioned, making data-loss extremely unlikely.

Task Analysis

Track - Photo taking

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- 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

Conditions

- Have an Android phone with camera
- Have a Dropbox account

Possible Conditions

- Android phone has GPS capabilities