bearMoney

Inspiration

Nowadays quite many people have a vague idea about how they spent money. Moreover, in most cases people underestimate their income and expenditures. In turns, this might force them to either loan money for short terms or limit costs to almost zero. We would like to offer simple but effective solution, which will help the user to manage daily (or monthly) costs and savings.

Capabilities of the app

The core functionality helps user to track on what exactly (s)he spends money on. It includes receiving purchase information, which contains not only total sum but also items and their prices (in a receipt manner). The goal is to reduce the amount of paper receipt and make them more available to the user at any time.

The core function will help bank customers to plan their savings better. It also could be tailored at any time and be more adaptive to user’s current needs. It will utilize information and allow the user to select items that will be added to savings statistics and help the user to track how well (s)he is doing.

Banks will receive the access to unlimited data about itemized transactions. This will help banks to earn profits through recommendations. They also could build a statistic on how credit reliable the client is.

The Story

Antti Karhunen goes to the grocery once in a week. From the shop, Antti usually purchases food, household goods and sometimes clothes and footwear. Antti used to estimate his total monthly costs, incomes and savings. One week Antti recieve s a newsletter from a bank, which suggests him to try a new application for finance management, because he hopes that it will save his time filling out the detailed information about his purchases. Antti downloads and installs the app and connects his credit card and phone number to it. The next day Antti notices that he is out of milk, and visits the nearest small grocery shop. After payment went through, Antti notices that he had received a push notification that contains receipt. The received receipt contains detailed information about the purchase, including items and their amount, price and possible devices. This information will be stored in the database and form the costs tables for current month.

Month later, Antti seems to get used to the app and enjoys using it. However, there are yet some features he does not know about. After month had passed, there is already enough information in the database to generate shopping lists for Antti for his weekly shopping. In addition, Antti notices that the shopping list takes into account how often did he buy certain goods during the month. Antti especially have been enjoying a possibility to plan his savings based on the statistical information how often he buys particular goods in a certain period of time. He can simply add the item to the saving plan, which will show information how he has been following his saving plan and how his certain purchases affect current state of savings.

At the same time, 600m away from Antti's home there is a grocery store. Before bank did launch the application, store's owner Mikko agreed with the bank to share information about his customers' purchases. Instead Mikko have an opportunity to reduce usage of paper receipts. This will not only make grocery a bit nature friendly but also cut expenses on the paper for receipts and maintenance of old cash machine systems. Yet application and API provide to Mikko even more opportunities, including utilization the information in a more sufficient way.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was to narrow down the idea, and create more specific use cases. Also we realised that prototype creation of this kind of application requires more time and better time management, and bigger team. Yet another challenge is to persuade shops, especially representatives of big shop chains, to share information with banks and decide what we will provide them with instead.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Creation of user stories
• Perform business analysis and question already existing ideas
• Improved UI design skills
• Development with Android Studio

What we learned

• Do not give up no matter how unsure you are about the solution
• Right people and look from outside can cheer you up and "open new horizons"

What's next for bearMoney

It should be thought more thoroughly about possible security issues and vulnerabilities. Utilize information from club cards about bonuses.

We had troubles with the domain.com But our domain is picked and it is bearmoney.net. Please, come to us to check it out if it is not available.

Built With

• android-studio
• api
• care