Recapt — Expense Tracking App

An entrepreneurship project exploring automated expense tracking through user research, surveys, and rapid prototyping.

Overview

As part of an entrepreneurship course at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, our team explored the challenges people face when tracking everyday expenses.

We conducted user surveys and interviews to understand existing spending habits and pain points, and developed Recapt, a mobile expense-tracking app designed to make recording purchases faster and more intuitive.

The app uses receipt image recognition to extract purchase information automatically, reducing the need for manual data entry. Spending data is then presented through visual charts to help users understand their spending patterns.

The project combined user research, problem validation, product ideation, and software development to develop and pitch a potential product.

App Demonstration

My Contributions

  • User Research: Contributed to designing and conducting user surveys to understand spending habits and identify user pain points.
  • Ideation: Participated in brainstorming sessions to develop and refine the product concept and features.
  • App Development: Contributed to developing the Recapt mobile application using Flutter, while learning Flutter application development.
  • Image Processing: Integrated Google’s image-to-text capabilities to extract purchase information from receipt images.

User Research

Before developing the application, we conducted surveys and user research to understand how people currently track their expenses and identify common pain points.

Our research highlighted the friction involved in manually recording individual purchases, motivating us to explore a solution that could automate this process while still providing users with useful insights into their spending.

Solution

Based on our research, we proposed Recapt, a mobile application that simplifies expense tracking through receipt scanning.

Users can capture a receipt using the app, after which the relevant purchase information is extracted and added to their expense history. The application organizes the information and presents spending patterns through visual charts.

Recapt streamlines expense tracking by extracting purchase information from receipts and automatically updating the user's expense history.

Product Development

The project followed an iterative entrepreneurship process:

User Research → Problem Identification → Ideation → Prototyping → Validation → Product Pitch

Rather than starting with the technology, we used survey results and user feedback to identify the problem and shape the proposed solution.

We then developed a functional prototype to demonstrate the core user journey and communicate how automated receipt processing could simplify everyday expense management.

Technical Highlights

  • Platform: Mobile application
  • Framework: Flutter
  • Receipt Processing: Image-to-text extraction
  • Visualization: Spending trends and expense charts
  • Development: Rapid prototyping
  • Research: User surveys and interviews
  • Focus: Personal expense management
  • Entrepreneurship: Problem validation, product ideation, and product pitching

Team

Sumit Patidar · Utkarsh Kunwar · Mostafa Abdelrahman · Hamid Dimyati · Badai Kesuma

Course Instructor: Dr. Henrik Blomgren
Mentor: Matej Rešetár
Advisor: Abhishek Mishra

References

[1] Flutter — Build apps for any screen. Available at: https://flutter.dev/ (Accessed: 12 December 2024).

[2] Reso Coder — Flutter TDD Clean Architecture tutorial. Available at: https://youtu.be/KjE2IDphA_U?si=czUNnjqubTzuU7kF (Accessed: 12 December 2024).