After my first post about expenses apps, which was an opinion about things that I consider to be incremental than repetitive in software development, my finger pointing happened to be “expenses tracking” although category audio players could be easily the point of discussion.
There is a theory where instead of adding to “on the giants’ shoulders”, the ego wants to do it from the beginning. Waste of time, spread of efforts in vain, most of the time. If the market has moved in a totally different direction you are chasing a dream. That could be us, too…
So here is a list of what we thought would be nice to have in a spending application, which is possible but want to hear from our customers (or other people) what are they thinking:
- budgets defined on any interval, cyclical or not
- expenses assigned to multiple budgets in the same time – like a real type of budgeting scenario
- notifications threshold based on variable values. Budgets being defined as percentage of income streams, or historical values
- OCR for receipts and automatic taxes management
- mini-classification within items of the receipt (food/house supplies/etc…)
- analyzing expenses and showing “patterns” of spending on items/vendors/places/categories. That could be the subject of another blog posting.
- based on line 5, suggested expiration dates for food and notifications when the time is close to do something with them
- based on “consuming speed”, prepare automatically “the weekly buying basket” without human intervention
- compute automatically the number of calories consumed by the whole family and assign a “health index”
Looking on numbers you can see if “culture” has a dollar value in your family life, education has space or music fits in the budget.
When the numbers are crunched for one family is one thing, but sharing it for a segment of the population can change some local laws. Some property taxes are corrected only after a small part of the population is moving out and starts to rent. Seeing the trend before hitting the wall can save the fabric of our society and relax the stress factor within families.
Obviously, the data I am talking about has to be shared, anonymously, for the benefit of pointing whether there is a trend. The power stays in numbers and AI/analytics have a place, even when some are afraid of privacy issues.
Summary
Expenses can tell you more than where the money is going, and if taxes are a burden for your family or health expenses threatens basic needs. It is easier to prevent than reconstruct, especially at the social level.