Desired Features

• Add money to envelopes or categories.
  • Monthly envelopes (i.e. You set aside $250 for rent each month, on the 1st of each month, BudgetTracker allocates $250 to that envelope)
  • Yearly envelopes (i.e. You set aside $600 to spend during the holidays and BudgetTracker will allocate $50 to that envelope each month so that at the end of the year you have $600 in that category)
• Potentially tie in with bank accounts. Possibly limit them to only allocate money that they have.
• Take a picture of a receipt and associate it with multiple entries
• Make it very easy to record spending, and have it take money from envelope/category.
• If we can tie it to a bank account, spending that appears on the account could be automatically deducted from envelopes/categories, or at least prompt the user to choose which category it belongs to. (another option instead of having the user put his/her banking information in, would be to upload account activity sheets and then have it parse it, then the user puts each purchase into a specific category... see https://www.wellsfargo.com/help/online-banking/comma-delimited)
• Specify whether or not you'd like unused money to "roll over" to the next month
  • Have "goal" envelopes (i.e. You want to save $20,000 for a car, each month you save $400 for the car, when you look at that envelope you see that you have $20,000 left to earn, then the next month $19,600, then the next $19,200 etc.)
• Ability to share a budget (both read and read/write sharing)
• RESTful...especially if we want to turn this into a mobile app
• Ability to track changes to the budget (i.e. You're married and budget with your spouse, you can see that on January 12th, your spouse entered a transaction for $10 at Walmart; or, you remember you spent about $40 at Sportsman's warehouse, then later you change it to $41.95 after finding the receipt (but you don't lose the ability to see that originally you'd put the transaction in as $40).
• This is a long shot but a really cool idea. Have any of you heard of Acorns? It's an app that will look at your bank account for spendings and automatically invest your change. So you spend $1.70 on something it will invest $.30 for you automatically. We could take this idea and have it be saved money instead of invested money. Obviously they would need to have their bank account linked and all of that.

###Features to Motivate users to Save

• Splurg "Balance" - As you make "good" budgeting decisions, you're splurg balance goes up (but you never actually SEE what it's at). When you want to "splurg" on some purchase, you type in the amount (as in $ amount) of the item, and the app tells you yes or no depending on how well you've been doing so far. The splurg balance then goes down each time you splurg. So if you want to splurg a lot on little things you can, or you can splurg on one big thing.
• Punishment - At the beginning of each month, X dollars is pulled from your account. At the end of each month, if you stayed within your budget you get X dollars back. If you didn't, you loose it and those who did meet their budgeting goals get a % of it?. Or you just loose it and we get it. Or you loose it and a friend of your choosing gets it. Or a charity of your choosing gets it.
• Savings game against random strangers - see who can save more. Winner gets $20 from loosers account.
• Savings game against friends - set an agreed upon award (doesn't have to happen through the app... could be anything). The person who saves more gets the reward (looser pays/provides it).
• Parenting tool - Set budgeting goals for your teen/college age children. Have a tiered reward system. The better the children do the better the reward.