EXPENSE MANAGEMENT

APPLICATION

  
Contents
1. Introduction.........................................................................................................................................2
a. Background and Motivation............................................................................................................2
b. Goals................................................................................................................................................2
c. App Monetization............................................................................................................................2
d. Other App........................................................................................................................................3
2. Discussion............................................................................................................................................3
a. Cloud Computing.............................................................................................................................3
b. MVVM..............................................................................................................................................3
c. Data Storing.....................................................................................................................................3
d. Sensors used....................................................................................................................................3
References...................................................................................................................................................4
 1. Introduction
a. Background and Motivation
Tracking your spending is often the first step in getting your finances in order. By understanding what
you spend money on and how much you spend, you can see exactly where your cash is going and areas
where you can cut back. It’s easy to make this part of your everyday routine thanks to expense tracker
apps that help you manage your money on the go. These apps certainly overlap with budgeting apps,
but while the latter provide a big-picture view of your finances, expense tracker apps put more of an
emphasis on your spending. These apps usually categorize your expenses and help you get a good idea
of your purchasing behavior.

b. Goals
From our application user will be able to do some of the following main features.

- Login/Signup (will try if we can do it with social media integration)

- Modify User Details
- Create, Update, Delete Expense Category
- Create, Update, Delete Expense
- Maintain Remaining Balance
- Assign Location for an Expense for location wise expense tracking
- View Monthly Expense
- Upload Details to Cloud Database

Our application will be a customizable one in which new types of expense types can be added so that it
will show up whenever a user wants to track a new expense against as specific expense type.
Furthermore, in the advancement of this application we can cover the aspect of reporting functionality
by providing some calculations of the expenses in the report.

We will add some location-based features for tracking the expenses according to the location to track
the expense comparison between two places. For example, if a user goes to restaurant A and spent
100$, 200$, 250$ visiting three times in a row for some time. On the other hand, he spends 50$, 60$,
70$ in restaurant B so it will be easy for a user to compare the expenses he spent in two restaurants
which will ultimately help him track the money he spent on both restaurants.

We will have track on incomes so that the balance will be maintained which will obviously be a
difference between income and expenses. It will be a nice to have feature so that the user will be always
aware of the remaining balance and can reconcile the amount with the bank. Just to start we will be
working on making an application eligible to track expenses in the daily life routine which will contain
most of the above-mentioned features. We will try to be as creative as possible to better provide ways
with an innovative and user-friendly experience.

c. App Monetization
As of now our application will be free to use and we will monitor the usage of the application initially
with feedbacks from the customers so that we can further enhance our application and then monetize it
as providing one month trial usage and after that payment must be done for further usage of the
application.

d. Other App
In the market, there are various apps doing the same job efficiently which we are trying to achieve.
There is an app AndroMoney which does the same job but misses the feature of location-based expense
tracking which we are introducing in our application.

2. Discussion
a. Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is a technology that allows people to use apps that haven’t been downloaded on
physical computers or servers but are stored in the cloud and can be accessed through the internet. In
mobile application development data persistence is the main factor which we need to consider as if a
user is a frequent device changer its possible that during switching the device important data gets lost.
So, cloud computing helps a lot in mobile application development, so the users have the ease of
developing apps on both IOs and Android.

Now since the mobile application becomes cloud based it becomes easy for integrating the web
analytics with it to know your customer’s main attributes so that the application’s further development
should advance in the specific direction. Another good factor includes the security, which is already
handled by the cloud itself, so it becomes easier for integrating the application with the payment
gateways without proving your application to be a secure one since it is already after being on cloud.

b. MVVM
MVVM is a recognized design pattern that majorly overcomes the drawbacks of MVC design pattern.
MVVM suggests separating the data presentation logic from the core business logic part of the
application. It removes the tight coupling between each component. Most importantly, in this
architecture, the children don’t have the direct reference to the parent, they only have the reference by
observables which makes the observables the key player for handling of all the functionality.

This pattern helps writing clean code which way more less dependencies of code segments on one
another resulting in cleaner and nondependent code that ultimately helps in manageability of the code.
Since it removes tight coupling between each component it ultimately means that we can write much
more efficient code with less worries of dependencies resulting in the rapid development of the
application.

c. Data Storing
We will initially be keeping the data locally on the mobile app since it will be an initial phase of the app
development. Database schema will include tables like Expense, Income, Users, etc. Later, we will
introduce a cloud-based platform on which we will deploy an API with the database server for dumping
the data on the cloud which will help in data persistence.

d. Sensors used
Our application will mainly use location sensor since we are introducing a new functionality for the
location-based expense tracking. Its totally dependent on the user whether he wants to add any location
to a specific expense item. Since location sensor will be used so popularly, we will be using Google Maps
API to integrate the maps’ view for showing the locations of the expenses.

References
[1] Gupta, H., Singh, A.P., Kumar, N. and Blessy, J.A., 2020. Expense Tracker: A Smart Approach to
Track Everyday Expense (No. 4809). EasyChair.
[2] Rouse, M., 2012. Search cloud computing. línea]. Available: https://searchcloudcomputing.
techtarget. com/definition/Software-as-a-Service.