Since I don't have any expenses I have to track for accounting purposes, I'm looking at this as a tool to track my own expenditure so as to help improve my spending habits. I realise the focus might be different so my suggestion may be useless to you!
What would be really useful to me would be reminders and notifications. With developing habits like this, I have a very hard time unless I'm constantly reminded. Like I take my lunch on weekdays at 12pm, so a reminder at half 12 or 1 would have me enter my lunch expenses. This could be further enhanced if you had a mobile app that used push notifications. This would be essential for me to develop the habit of doing it.
My thinking with mobile push notifications would be you tap the notification and it takes you straight to a simple UI where you punch in the values.
It might be harder to reduce the friction as low as this with email notifications but it could work just as well. A simple link could work, or one step further is having a feature where you can specify expenditure and tags in the reply to an email in a certain format that's parsed by your app e.g:
$8, work, commuting $4.50, lunch
(Values in example may seem low because I'm British but dollar/pound symbol is neither here nor there in this case!)
* -> email.
I think a lot of people would like to see what the app might look like before giving away their email address.
Unfortunately, their is zero interest within banks to build this.
Edit: I do too many transactions to use something like this or Toshl.
I work for a big bank, and I tried pushing the idea around a bit, but to no avail.
It really comes down to "business need" - the department responsible for the online services would need to be convinced that there is a desire and a benefit to providing an API key. I imagine they would see it negative for two ways - added risk by having sites/programs connect to their application, and they won't see the added benefit to customers, and vice-versa - customers wouldn't really know what to do with the key.
It would take a player like Mint to make that case - they could do branding with a major bank such that they are the first to safely share data, but then recommend products, etc.
I want to click on the tags that I have used so far, so that I can see a summary for that tag, but it doesn't seem to do anything.
Entering the amounts on mobile could be improved if you could popup a number keypad on focus. And a calendar select couldn't hurt either.
Again, well done!
BTW: I think that this the sort of service where Freemium doesn't make sense. You need people to get value out of the system, not offer them some crippled version for free and hope they will upgrade.
With this sort of service it is best to offer everything with a generous trial period.
Once someone has their data in your system they will want to pay you when the time comes as they have invested their time to get their data into your system. But getting people to convert will depend on whether you are offering them true value, and this can be best achieved by exposing all the value from the start.
- If I enter a nonnumeric value in the expense field it doesn't complain but enters the detail as 0$ and tag details. It would create some mishap in the mobile devices.
- If I enter a numeric value and don't fill the tag and explanation fields the system reenters last valid value. For example if I entered $1234 and home as the tag it will repeat if I enter 200 for the amount and erased the autofilled home tag.
- There isn't a way to delete/edit previous entries. I should be able to delete them at least...
Apart from these little stuff the system rocks. :) Keep up the good work, mate.
However, I can't consider this an MVP. Sure it is minimal, but it is barely usable as it is right now. I'd like a datepicker, instead of writing the date by hand, and I'd like to be able to have a suggestion of tags I used in the past. I'd like to have the enter key submit the form. Such small details that would add great value.
Moreover, I expected the Day, Week, Month filter to show me only the expenses in that time frame, instead of just the total changing.
Keep it up! Very good job overall.
2) What makes this different from Expensify or Mint?
BUT,
there are some basic features missing, such as: currency config (Europeans have Internet too ;), subject & comment notes. A receipt upload would be really great too. Plus, as much as I love Bootstrap, please invest $15 in a custom theme ;)
Nice job!
