Tracking expenses app-ily

Every month-end, students have one thing to worry about — empty wallets. And then those restaurant or grocery bills are ferreted out to check where did their money go.

 

At the recent Microsoft code.fun.do hackathon at IIIT-H, four third-year students thought about making it an easy task to calculate monthly expenses. Aditya Baskar, Harshit Harchani, Nisarg Jhaveri and Chanakya Malireddy came up with the idea of the app Accountable, a personal accounts manager.

 

“It’s a platform where you can manage your accounts and multiple expenditures,” says Aditya, adding, “I remember accompanying my mother for grocery shopping and she would come home and write it all down. At the end of the month, my parents would take out the notebook and calculate the expenses. This app will make calculating all of that an easy process.”

 

Talking about how it functions, he says, “Every time you make a transaction, you get a message from the bank. The messages will be automatically detected by the app and it will show your balance. It classifies your daily expenses into categories. And the information stays only on your phone.”

 

The team also had the idea of group splitting which is done in the app Splitwise. “We couldn’t add the feature as we didn’t have time during the hackathon,” says Aditya. Another cool aspect of the app is the speech recognition feature. “Every time you spend money somewhere, all you have to do is open the app and say it out loud and it will keep a tab. You can even say something like “I owe Rs 200 to Ravi (a friend) and it will keep a tab of that. So, there are three divisions — income, expenditure and settlement.”

 

The group won a prize of Rs 8,000 each and they now plan to make it fully functional.