Advice/Suggestions for budgeting app

tloz123

Hi there. In my spare time I am currently developing a mobile application to help people better manage their money through budgeting. I am taking inspiration from Martin Lewis’s budgeting tip in terms of averaging “one-off” payments throughout the year (I.e. paying off a car insurance annually etc).

I will post screenshots soon when I’m back at my laptop but essentially in my application, the onboarding journey allows the user to input their fixed incomes and fixed expenses (e.g. their monthly salary, their weekly commuting cost etc). Once added, they’re taken to the main dashboard in which there’s a calendar view showing the occurrence of their expenditure. They also have the option to also add any ad-hoc expenses/incomes (e.g. their coffee for lunch, their cinema ticket etc) which will be reflected on the calendar.

Now, I’m building a bar graph to try and depict the “average” net balance per week per month but struggling to figure out how to depict it… or even what to depict! 

Currently I am thinking of having a bar graph. Each bar graph will represent a week and there’ll be 4-5 bars for a given month (since there’s 4-5 weeks in a month. User will be able to navigate across months).

e.g. you have a monthly salary of £2500 and then a yearly car insurance payment as part of your annual fixed expense of £1000. So the bar graph height will be £556 (£576, avg weekly income, minus £19.23, avg weekly expense for the car insurance). So £556 depicts your theoretical spend for that given week. If you spend more than this in the given week then you’re in the negative. So if you bought a £1000 TV, on week 1 of the month, the first bar would be -£443, but the subsequent bars will be at £556.

Is this useful? Is it confusing? Should I average the adhoc expenditures to for that given month so when the user buys that TV, all the bar subsequent bar graphs are adjusted accordingly? 

But what I’ve noticed in Martin Lewis’s tip for budgeting is that he states to forward plan, budget the holiday, the xmas dinner, the bday gifts etc. in my app, it’s more “dynamic” but surely it doesn’t make a diffference ?

Thank you for your time and effort.

ThePirates

Good luck with your project! I tried something similar a few years ago but have up trying to carry for every eventuality in different people's circumstances e.g. a lot of people are paid 4 weekly rather than monthly but still have monthly bills so in effect get 1 'months' pay with possible no bills coming out of it! 

I returned to using a spreadsheet with sections for money in (4 weekly), DDs and SOs (combination of 4 weekly and monthly), savings payments (monthly) etc and I enter all my ad-hoc transactions. 

One of the key features I wanted was a look ahead view, so basically all bit my ad-hoc transactions are forecast forwards by at least a year (I currently run to 18 months) so I can tell exactly what the balance of my 8 current and 25 savings accounts will be on any given day in the next 18 months. This also helps with tracking forecasted interest payments too try and keep within my tax free allowance.

Emmia

tloz123 said:

Hi there. In my spare time I am currently developing a mobile application to help people better manage their money through budgeting. I am taking inspiration from Martin Lewis’s budgeting tip in terms of averaging “one-off” payments throughout the year (I.e. paying off a car insurance annually etc).

I will post screenshots soon when I’m back at my laptop but essentially in my application, the onboarding journey allows the user to input their fixed incomes and fixed expenses (e.g. their monthly salary, their weekly commuting cost etc). Once added, they’re taken to the main dashboard in which there’s a calendar view showing the occurrence of their expenditure. They also have the option to also add any ad-hoc expenses/incomes (e.g. their coffee for lunch, their cinema ticket etc) which will be reflected on the calendar.

Now, I’m building a bar graph to try and depict the “average” net balance per week per month but struggling to figure out how to depict it… or even what to depict! 

Currently I am thinking of having a bar graph. Each bar graph will represent a week and there’ll be 4-5 bars for a given month (since there’s 4-5 weeks in a month. User will be able to navigate across months).

e.g. you have a monthly salary of £2500 and then a yearly car insurance payment as part of your annual fixed expense of £1000. So the bar graph height will be £556 (£576, avg weekly income, minus £19.23, avg weekly expense for the car insurance). So £556 depicts your theoretical spend for that given week. If you spend more than this in the given week then you’re in the negative. So if you bought a £1000 TV, on week 1 of the month, the first bar would be -£443, but the subsequent bars will be at £556.

Is this useful? Is it confusing? Should I average the adhoc expenditures to for that given month so when the user buys that TV, all the bar subsequent bar graphs are adjusted accordingly? 

But what I’ve noticed in Martin Lewis’s tip for budgeting is that he states to forward plan, budget the holiday, the xmas dinner, the bday gifts etc. in my app, it’s more “dynamic” but surely it doesn’t make a diffference ?

Thank you for your time and effort.

There are already budgeting apps out there, with various pros and cons - my question is how are you funding this long term in terms of development and maintenance? Where is the data that users enter stored?

friolento

tloz123 said:

Hi there. In my spare time I am currently developing a mobile application to help people better manage their money through budgeting. I am taking inspiration from Martin Lewis’s budgeting tip in terms of averaging “one-off” payments throughout the year (I.e. paying off a car insurance annually etc).

I will post screenshots soon when I’m back at my laptop but essentially in my application, the onboarding journey allows the user to input their fixed incomes and fixed expenses (e.g. their monthly salary, their weekly commuting cost etc). Once added, they’re taken to the main dashboard in which there’s a calendar view showing the occurrence of their expenditure. They also have the option to also add any ad-hoc expenses/incomes (e.g. their coffee for lunch, their cinema ticket etc) which will be reflected on the calendar.

Now, I’m building a bar graph to try and depict the “average” net balance per week per month but struggling to figure out how to depict it… or even what to depict! 

Currently I am thinking of having a bar graph. Each bar graph will represent a week and there’ll be 4-5 bars for a given month (since there’s 4-5 weeks in a month. User will be able to navigate across months).

e.g. you have a monthly salary of £2500 and then a yearly car insurance payment as part of your annual fixed expense of £1000. So the bar graph height will be £556 (£576, avg weekly income, minus £19.23, avg weekly expense for the car insurance). So £556 depicts your theoretical spend for that given week. If you spend more than this in the given week then you’re in the negative. So if you bought a £1000 TV, on week 1 of the month, the first bar would be -£443, but the subsequent bars will be at £556.

Is this useful? Is it confusing? Should I average the adhoc expenditures to for that given month so when the user buys that TV, all the bar subsequent bar graphs are adjusted accordingly? 

But what I’ve noticed in Martin Lewis’s tip for budgeting is that he states to forward plan, budget the holiday, the xmas dinner, the bday gifts etc. in my app, it’s more “dynamic” but surely it doesn’t make a diffference ?

Thank you for your time and effort.

What hourly rate are you offering to people helping you with the development of your app? How are you paying - cash, bank xfer, bitcoins?

sausage_time

To me monthly totals/amortisation makes the most sense for most scenarios.  I find it useful to know monthly spend on things like food+drink, bills, cars, pets etc.  In my system I amortise annual bills (like insurance) over 12 months to nominally spread the cost.

tloz123

I have uploaded a video walkthrough for the time being. Ignore the horrible UI for the time being. Just want some clarification on how to present the data on the graph.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UIG336mDyyB2O64IzuSrQtYh0proi5LH/view

Timestamps:
0:00-0:23 - Onboarding journey - the user inputs their fixed income (e.g. monthly salary etc) and fixed expenses (e.g. rent etc).
0:24-1:23 - Going through the main view. This will be the main screen of the application.
1:24 - 1:35 - Navigating the bar chart. This is what I need some advice/suggesstions/ideas on
1:36 - 2:01 - Adding an adhoc dinner expense and navigating through the calender to showcase the running balance.
2:02 - 2:26 - Going back to bar chart to show how the adhoc expense affected the bar chat.

sausage_time said:

To me monthly totals/amortisation makes the most sense for most scenarios.  I find it useful to know monthly spend on things like food+drink, bills, cars, pets etc.  In my system I amortise annual bills (like insurance) over 12 months to nominally spread the cost.

I see. So a breakdown of what you've spent on etc. That's in the pipelines soon. Amortising the annual bills over 12 months is exactly what I want to essentially achieve. In the bar graph, I amortise anything fixed to get a "theoretical spend" of what you afford in a given week for that month, and then ofc the chart gets updated based on the adhoc expenses a person does. Sounds good? Sounds complicated?

ThePirates said:

Good luck with your project! I tried something similar a few years ago but have up trying to carry for every eventuality in different people's circumstances e.g. a lot of people are paid 4 weekly rather than monthly but still have monthly bills so in effect get 1 'months' pay with possible no bills coming out of it! 

I returned to using a spreadsheet with sections for money in (4 weekly), DDs and SOs (combination of 4 weekly and monthly), savings payments (monthly) etc and I enter all my ad-hoc transactions. 

One of the key features I wanted was a look ahead view, so basically all bit my ad-hoc transactions are forecast forwards by at least a year (I currently run to 18 months) so I can tell exactly what the balance of my 8 current and 25 savings accounts will be on any given day in the next 18 months. This also helps with tracking forecasted interest payments too try and keep within my tax free allowance.

Yes that's also my aim. Glad to hear you've done something in the past! The passion for striving for financial literacy and money mnagement is the goal! What you've done sounds like something I've accomplished but it's just a matter of putting it in a friendly UI.