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We have all experienced that one rainy day when you comically open your purse, and look down at the bottom of it. All to contemplate the echoing question-'Where did I spend all my money?!
It happens to the best of us, and there is nothing to be guilty of. What we offer is a solution. If you could subconsciously track your expenses and be able to engage with the data, it won't be too hard to track your expenses and rectify this habit.
This app prototype is one of the most comprehensive personal finance tools because of its integration of data analytics, as well as manual transaction addition. With apps that are similar, you cannot add pictures of receipts manually. This means you don't have a comprehensive idea of the expense breakdown of your cash. Once you withdraw cash from your ATM, the bank app can only tell you how much you withdrew. And not how much you actually ended up spending, or where.
Like most other personal finance apps, the onboarding process of Make Cents needs you to sign up with your email. Once you have signed up, you will be sent a verification mail which you need to further verify in order to get a login id and password. Next, you can sign in with your verified email and selected password to set up your account.
Your account has 2 different 'parts' so to speak. The first part is income. Here, you can enter your salary, tips, or any other incoming money that you might have during that month.
The other section is Expense. Here, you can make manual entries of your expenses by scanning the receipts, or even by scanning the card machine. You can also make manual entries of expenses where you put in the amount that you spent and what category the expense lies in.
Over time, the app would also integrate online purchases, which will make it watertight. This is very handy because now you have a better understanding of your expenses irrespective of how you make them- either through cash or by card.
Once you have plugged in all the income and expenses, the app will get to work. You will now have a comprehensive pie chart of your expenses and where you made them. This will tell you where you spent your money and when. There are various expense categories like 'Shopping', 'Food and Drinks', 'Electronics', 'Entertainment', etc. This is important because you will have a dynamic map of your spending habits at one glance.
Moreover, your data gets stacked over time and you can track your spending habits over a couple of months. If you are trying to quit drinking with friends and going out so much, you can see your progress in real-time, pushing you to actually act on your resolve.
You can filter/sort this data according to dates or even days. If you wish to know the trends of your expense, you can easily see how much you spent on weekends during your night out. You can do the same with your income. If you have a business and you want to track your income-expense ratio, it is very easy to do so using this app. Especially as you would get great insights from the data.
Most people try and do this manually on MS Excel. What makes it difficult to sustain, however, is that it is not engaging. It is not meant to be. With Make Cents, the user is more likely to use/refer to the data because the data is visualized properly. You can even track your expenses in one particular category over a period of months or years. And you can do this almost instantly. Doing such a thing by referring to bank statements would take a person ages.
As a teenager, there are not many apps that help you get your finances in order. Also, numbers can be quite intimidating if you are just learning how to manage finances. This app is easy to get on, and even easier to use as it helps you visualize all the data in a comprehensive manner. You won't have to worry about keeping track of your money. All you'd need to do is enter your values and the app will do the rest.
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