Money Tracking App: The Paper Trail

Have you ever been really broke and started remembering all the times you spent money anyhow?

Have you ever wondered how much money you’ve spent on food? Or clothes? Or novels? Or partaysss?

Have you ever been hungry and thought about all the times you wasted food?

Do you know what takes most of you money each month?

Money Problems

The problem is that we don’t have a way to actually track our expenses and it’s only when we’ve run out of money that we try to reflect on our spending habits. Even when we do, we cannot know for sure if we did well or not.

While some people are good at keeping these records manually, most of us aren’t(yes, I’m one of them). We need somthing to track it for us and automatically supply the data when it is needed.

How much easier my budgeting will be! How smooth plans will go!

The Solution

This app tracks all the activities on your bank account.

It will sync with mobile money platforms to pull as much money data as possible. As more transactions become digital, it becomes easier to contain all useful data.

See all your spending habits displayed in easy to understand charts. Know what you need to change and what  you need to continue. Become the master of you finances.

Create budgets and be forced to keep to it. How? This app will suspend your bank account if you go beyond the budget. It will only be opened if you get approval from your Control Individual.

Set up standing orders for repititive payments. Do you subscribe every month, or pay utility bills? Never worry about that again.

Save automatically!!! Set up a percentage of your spending that will be saved. Each time you spend, it silently deducts this amount. Until you desperately need it(also confirmed by your Control Individual), you will not have access to those funds.

Caution: Do not set the Control Individual as your current boyfriend/girlfriend. If you break up your money don go oooo!!!!

Process

First, the app has to come from someone with stake in the money game. Ideally, this will be a bank.

However, it will be difficult to make this reach everyone cause each bank will then create rival apps instead of collaborating.

So instead, the app can work with a cross payment system such as the goverment approved Remita. It will also help foster mobile payments by creating an easy to access mobile payments solution that works across all banks.

How will the app make money? By gathering data. The app will use the data generated from thousands of users to gain insight into the general spending habits of the population.

This data can be viewed according to demographics. This data will be sold to consumer focused businesses for them to forge better product strategies.

The data can also be used by the government to know what truly drives the economy.

This is my idea for the day. What you think?

COOL or CRAP?