Intelligent Online Budget Tracker
Girish Bekaroo and Sameer Sunhaloo
School of Business Informatics and Software Engineering,
University of Technology, Mauritius
[email protected]
[email protected]
Abstract
We present an intelligent online budget tracker (GeniusIOBT.com) to efficiently manage house-hold budget. Our system will help to plan and track househouse-hold-budget related issues where mem-bers of the system can securely access it anytime from anywhere via the Internet. The Intelligent Online Budget Tracker not only keeps track of the budget but also provides means to analyze data via charts and graphs as well as intelligently predicting future budgets and issues like bankruptcy.
Keywords: intelligent online budget tracker, household budget, data analysis
Introduction
Budgeting is an integral part of the society. Budget Tracking involves recording and analyzing the incomes and expenses of a person or an organization over a particular period of time. Today, since we are living in a hurry up and get it done society, many people are looking forward to effi-cient ways to budget their time and money. During the recent years, some research has been car-ried out on household budget (Access Consultants, 1998; Central Statistics Office, 2001; Euro-pean Countries, 2004; Muellbauer, 2006; Redpath, 1986; Yemtsov, 2007). It has been noted that in most cases, budget management is being done mentally and never being put on paper which makes Budget Tracking very difficult. This is probably due to the fact that many people do not know how to do it or do not have an appropriate means that will do Budget Tracking and Analy-sis for them.
Budgeting also requires us to look ahead and formalize future goals. By establishing a budget, people can set goals for achieving a certain level of income and monitor their expenses. Many home based and small-business owners have observed that their increase in profit margins did not occur until they had a written revenue goal and a method with which to monitor expenses (Cen-tral Statistics Office, 2001; Redpath, 1986).
Budget Tracking is important because it helps us to keep track of our expenditures based on the incomes made. It also allows us to plan for future projects and expenditures. Being able to ana-lyse and compare income and expenses over a period of time, by calculating monthly/yearly
prof-its and expenses as well as deviations, help us to take important decisions. Bankruptcy and future budgets can also be predicted via the data fed during Budget Tracking Budget Tracking. One of the main objectives in develop-ing the Intelligent Online Budget Tracker is to create a clear picture of the financial situation of the members by
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penditures as it happens. The member must also be able to have access to the home budget any-time and from anywhere. The online application will help to reduce existing budget problems (paperwork) and provide means for budget analysis and give instant and accurate feedback. The Intelligent Online Budget Tracker must also help in calculation and prediction of important issues like profit margin and deviations or bankruptcy prediction.
Related Work
Many home budgeting tools (betterbudgeting.com; mybudgetkeeper.com; RLT Family Budget, 2003) already exist but most of them are local-based. These tools are run on the local computer mainly because of security reasons. Most of these tools have been developed in languages like Visual Basic or Visual basic.Net and are run on Windows platform because Windows is the oper-ating system that is mostly being used for home purposes. Figure 1 shows a screenshot of a com-mercial budget tracking software called Graphics Account (FKJ Software, 2005) which manages home/personal budget. The various parameters that affect the budget tracking process and predic-tion like inflapredic-tion or market variability are visible in Figure 1.
Figure 1- Budget Management Software
These local based budget tracking software now seem to be quite limiting because of the mobility of people. Today, due to the massive use of the internet, people want to be able to access every service they need from anywhere. Online applications can also be accessed by browsers in mobile phones which are becoming very effective for use in today’s world. Hence, web based budget tracking applications are preferred to the local based budget tracking applications. Online Budget Tracking applications also exist and most of them are commercial ones because of the cost of im-plementation of the application as well as the high level of implemented security and maintenance which is very costly. Personal Mvelopes (In2M Corporation, 2007) is an example of an online budget management application which is famous for managing and predicting the budget of its members but is only available to the inhabitants of the United States of America.
Research
As stated in the previous section, for most people budget tracking is still a manual process being conducted on pieces of paper. Copybooks and notebooks are used for this purpose where the weekly or monthly expenses are written as per the willingness of the person. At the end of the month, the total for the income/expenses made is then calculated so that comparison can be made against previous months. A sample page from these copybooks is shown in Figure 2.
My Expenses Period: June 2006 _____
Expenses Total Cost (Rs.)
Kelvinator Fridge 100 L 28, 000 Wooden Furniture (5 pieces) 32, 000
Groceries 8, 000
Cinema (3 times * 4 persons) 1, 200
Total Cost: Rs. 69, 200
Figure 2- Expense Management
In addition to expenses management shown in Figure 2, income management is also done which consumes more pages of the copybook.
The problems identified with the actual system being used by most people are as follows: • Much detail cannot be kept since there is much rewrite to be done which makes the task
boring.
• Involves much paperwork which: o occupy lots of space,
o can be easily lost or stolen,
o may become dirty or get damaged thus causing lost of information, o may lead to clarity problems due to handwriting problems.
• Searching and referencing is difficult and time consuming. • Analysis and comparison of data becomes difficult. • Reports generation is a tedious process.
Proposed Solution
A solution for the problem described above is to provide an online means to store and manage the financial data (budget) of these people and this will involve two-tier architecture: the database tier where all these data are stored and the application tier which the members will use to gain access to the system. The major reason why the proposed application should be online is that household owners can access their financial data from anywhere at any time via the Internet either from the browser of a computer or that of new mobile phones.
The proposed system must be able to support many users at the same time. It must provide to the users an appropriate interface where they can store all their financial data for various
months/years online. They must also be able to analyse the financial data as well as generating desired reports and getting some useful predictions.
Budgeting Approach
People have needs and needs normally cost money. In other words, to satisfy various needs, such as clothing, grocery, and entertainment, expenses need to be made. At the same time, to cater for these expenses, people have to earn an income, for example by working or being lucky in gam-bling. This implies that a budget will have categories like Clothing, Entertainment or Gamgam-bling. Now, gambling can earn money in different ways like horse racing or casino while entertainment can be a form of expenditure by going to the cinema or dating with girlfriend. Hence, we can find that the main categories may have various sub-categories. And the sub-categories can also be expanded further. However, going into too much detail can be cumbersome. So, for the conven-ience of the user, the amount of information to be recorded is kept to a minimum. The same rea-soning applies to the choice of the timescale of the project. A representation in days or weeks when income or expenditures occur will involve too much detail while a yearly representation will involve a very low level of detail which is inappropriate. Thus, the proposed system will ca-ter for monthly budget of our members which will involve the best level of detail stored for home budget.
Security Analysis
The users of the Intelligent Online Budget Tracker will have to send their personal data (like their income and expenses) online. But the fundamental question that arises is “Who will like to send all his financial details online?”
In a way, thinking like this would have been correct twenty years or thirty years ago when the Internet World was not much developed. But today, where the world is becoming a cyber one and thousands of new users per day are accessing the World Wide Web for the first time and at the same time, the progress in the Computer and Internet World is so fast that new technologies, platforms or computer-related issues, such as security, agent technology, and robotics, are being brought to the world at a pretty fast pace. So, sending personal data online is not a real problem as such.
For this, security measures, for example, keeping the anonymity of the users, secure authentica-tion or access control can be used to ensure that the user is really the one whom he claims to be. A User Tracking System (accounting) can also be integrated in the web-application so as to keep a log file about which user has accessed which page or performed what task at what instant and from which computer (IP Tracking) so that if any malicious task takes place in the online-application, the source of the problem can easily be tracked.
Also, techniques like cryptography or hashing can be used to protect the data entered by users. In other words, the data stored in the database will not be the same as the data entered by the user.
Public Keys can also be used which is known only by the user and without this, the data stored in the database can not be decrypted easily. So, if anyone has gained illegal access to the system database, he will not be able to interpret the data easily.
Hence, security is a crucial issue for the Intelligent Online Budget Tracker which has to be im-plemented with great care.
The Intelligent Online Budget Tracker
The developed system is an independent and totally self-contained product which will prove to be beneficial to both the company hosting it as well as its members. Many features will be present in the system that will facilitate money management of the users of the system.
On the first instance, the members need to register with the system. They will get unique login information which they can use every time they visit the system. Our Intelligent Online Budget Tracker will then allow them to:
• Plan their budget
Some days before an expense or an income occurs, the members of the system can input about what they think they can have as income or expense for the current month or for the next months of the same financial year.
• Track their budget
As an income or expense occurs, the registered members need to feed it to the system at the same time respecting about what they have planned initially for that specific category (for example, entertainment, or groceries).
• Analyse their budget
Based on the data fed to the system, different calculations will be made like profits, deviations, etc… and also monthly/yearly reports will be auto-generated which the users can download and keep as reference for what incomes and expenses they have had for different months or budgets. Budget Analysis is also done by using the built-in graphs and charting controls provided in the website where again the generated graphs/charts can be downloaded for reference and as a history for the different comparisons made.
• Predict their future budgets
Our system will also be intelligent where budget prediction will be made easy. This implies that the users can check their future budgets based on previous data fed and new issues they want to define like increase in cost of living or other factors that will affect prediction. At the same time, reports and charts will be generated which will facilitate the comparison and analysis of data. Budget Prediction is a very tedious process since it involves a number of different parameters that can affect the budget. Also, unexpected events may occur that change the picture of the financial situation of the person, for example, winning a lottery or losing a huge amount on the share mar-ket.
It has also been observed that budget prediction accuracy decreases as the time difference for the prediction increases (Statistics Office, 2001). One important reason is a change in the stan-dard/style of living. Possible causes of the change of stanstan-dard/style of living are inflation, change of marital status and a growth in the family. So, a reasonable number of years should be allowed for prediction in our Intelligent Online Budget Tracker.
In our Intelligent Online Budget Tracker, Budget Prediction made has been based on a statistical analysis on the data fed by the user himself, that is, it means prediction of the budget of that per-son based on his past and present financial situation. This uses techniques such as mean and stan-dard deviation.
Technical Details
As methodology, the Rational Unified Process (RUP), which is an iterative software develop-ment, has been the adopted. The RUP is not a single concrete prescriptive process, but rather an adaptable process framework, intended to be tailored by selecting elements of the process that are appropriate for our system’s needs. This object oriented methodology is better than other function oriented software methodologies since it is highly customizable according to the system needs in addition to its iterative nature.
The choice of the methodology to be used also defines the coding methodology to be used, which involves the use of Object Oriented Programming concepts which is very advantageous in the way that it promotes code reuse and encapsulation.
Also, the system has been developed using several modern technologies so that it can fulfil the requirements of the users. To construct the Intelligent Online Budget Tracker, the ASP.NET 2.0 platform has been used where both VB and C# have been used as server-side languages. For auto-generated images, GDI+ has been used as well. Javascript has been the main client-side scripting language used for validations and the display of friendly user messages to the user.
CSS technology has been used massively which renders the constant display of the design in all the forms. CSS reduces the size of the pages which makes it faster to load than the use of images. XML Technologies have also been used so as to dynamically configure the server from a client host by the administrator. XML is platform independent and will also help a lot in later migration of components of the system if expansion is needed.
Flash has also been used but the sizes of the animations have been kept minimal.
Application Prototype
In this section, we present some of the captures made on the working system. In some of these captures, we will focus only on part of the form where emphasis is being laid on.
Registration Form
In Figure 3 we show the registration form of GeniusIOBT.com where guests can create their ac-count so as to be able to use the budget tracking Services.
Figure 3 - Registration Form
In the Registration Form shown in Figure 3, we can find the presence of a Help Area which pro-vides helpful messages related to the different fields in this form as well as a Did You Know area which gives the users different helpful messages on GeniusIOBT.com mainly. Security Images are also present in the form so as to prevent replay attacks on the system where some attacker can capture important details and use it later on.
User Groups
Different user categories (Guest, Member or Administration) will have a different view on the homepage of the system. This will guide them to the most common tasks that they can perform being a user of that category. This is shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4 - User Groups Panel
Login with Validation
The Login Form, authentication of the members and administrators, is shown in Figure 5. The figure also shows the use of validations. Users can try to log in with a maximum of 5 attempts within two hours. This is one of the security features of the website.
Menus
Several menus have been used to enable users to navigate throughout the website.
Figure 6 - Application’s Menus
Content Display in Grids
Grids have been used in many forms in the system to give the user more details about different features like Budget, Currency, etc. Figure 7 shows a sample GeniusIOBT.com grid to show ex-istent currencies in the system.
Budget Tracking
The Budget Tracking page is where the user will spend most of his time while connected to Gen-iusIOBT.com. This is the place where he will feed all his financial data so that he can success-fully track, analyze and predict future Budgets. The screenshot in Figure 8 shows part of this page.
Figure 8 - Budget Tracking Layout
My Assistant (Popup)
An inner web window (popup) has been used to separate content within a page and to display more information to the user. This is more advantageous than an external Javascript window be-cause it provides immediate updates when changes occur. Figure 9 shows a sample ‘My Assis-tant’ window:
Figure 9 - My Assistant
Dynamic Charting
Budget Analysis is an important part in GeniusIOBT.com and many types of charts/graphs have been provided to the user so that he can easily analyze the data of his budget. Figures 10 through 13 show some of the generated charts that the members can take advantage of.
Figure 12 - Donut Chart Figure 13 - Donut Chart (3D)
Budget Prediction is also shown in terms of graphs. The three-dimensional horizontal bar chart in Figure 14 shows a sample generated chart for prediction.
Message Subsystem
GeniusIOBT.com has its own in-built communication mechanism for the direct communication between the members and the administrator (one way only). This will reduce the headache of the administrator or the user having to frequently access their outer mailboxes. Figure 15 shows the Inbox of our system. A Rich-Text Editor is used for the editing and sending of messages.
Figure 15 - Inbox
Miscellaneous Forms
Our system also has many other features that enhance the system and provide the user with sim-ple useful tools that he can use during his Budget Tracking process. Examsim-ples include the user guide or the Contact Form for communication between guests and our system. Similarly, we also have a scientific calculator (Figure 16), a currency converter (Figure 17), a loan calculator, ex-change rates, etc.
Conclusion
We have presented a working prototype of an intelligent online budget tracker. The development of this application has been conducted in a stepwise manner using the well defined methodology, RUP, customised according to the requirements of the system. Most of the goals set at the begin-ning of the development phase have been met. Security issues like web security or network secu-rity have also been treated in the design and development of the system, thus increasing the reli-ability of the system. Quality management issues have also been handled satisfactorily.
References
Access Consultants. (1998). The final report on the analysis of the household budget and expenditure sur-vey for St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Atlanta GA. Retrieved August 15, 2006, from
http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Library/3954/svghbes.pdf
Central Statistics Office. (2001). Household budget survey. Government of Ireland. Retrieved August 15, 2006, from http://www.cso.ie/releasespublications/documents/housing/hbs.pdf
European Countries. (2004). Household budget surveys in candidate countries: Methodological analysis 2003. European Countries. Luxembourg. Retrieved February 19, 2007, from
http://europa.eu.int/estatref/info/sdds/en/hbs/hbs_meth2003_cand_countries.pdf FKJ Software. (2005). Graphics Account 1.3. Retrieved November 9, 2006, from
http://www.softplatz.com/Soft/Home-Hobby/Personal-Finance/Graphic-Accounts.html
In2M Corporation. (2007). Home budget software for household, family & personal money management. Retrieved April 10, 2007, from http://www.mvelopes.com/
Muellbauer, J. (2006). Housing and personal wealth in a global context. United Nations World Institute for Development Economics Research. Retrieved January11, 2007, from
http://www.csae.ox.ac.uk/resprogs/smmsae/pdfs/smmsae-2006-02.pdf
Redpath, B. (1986). Family expenditure surveys: a second study of differential responses comparing census characteristics of FES respondents and non-respondents. Statistical News, 72, 151-171.
RLT Family Budget Related. (2003). Retrieved November 9, 2006, from http://www.sharewareconnection.com/rlt-family-budget.htm
Yemtsov, R. (2007). Housing privatization and household wealth in transition. World Institute for Devel-opment Economics Research. Research Paper No. 2007/02. Retrieved February 19, 2007, from http://www.wider.unu.edu/publications/rps/rps2007/rp2007-02.pdf
Biographies
Girish Bekaroo has a BSc degree with First Class Honours in Computer Science with Network
Security from the University of Technology Mauritius.
Sameer Sunhaloo is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Technology Mauritius. He joined the