Research
Introduction
The financial literacy of Sri Lankans is relatively low, leading to difficulties in managing personal finances. This research presents a smart solution to simplify the complexities associated with money management and assist individuals in managing their finances more efficiently to achieve better financial health without requiring a comprehensive knowledge of money management from the user. The proposed system automates personal finance management with minimal user effort, reducing manual data entry by tracking cash flow by utilizing SMS messages and expense bills to extract bank transaction data and cash expenditures. Each extracted expense will automatically be categorized into the correct expense category. The system also generates a custom budget plan for each user based on spending patterns to help them stay on the budget throughout the month and avoid irrational overspending. Furthermore, the system provides a mechanism to predict future expenses associated with upcoming events based on calendar events, allowing users to devise the most efficient budget plan and avoid facing financially unprepared events in the upcoming month. All these smart solutions are bundled up in the “Wonga” mobile application to help users make better financial decisions to achieve personal financial success.
Background
The low financial literacy among Sri Lankans poses significant challenges in effectively managing personal finances, leading to financial difficulties and limited financial health. Currently available systems for expense tracking and budget planning rely on manual data entry, requiring individuals to record their expenses manually or use basic categorization methods. These systems lack the intelligence to accurately categorize expenses and fail to provide personalized budget plans based on individual spending patterns. Moreover, they do not leverage calendar events to predict upcoming expenses, leaving individuals unprepared for future financial obligations. To address these limitations, this research aims to develop a smart solution called "Wonga," a mobile application that automates personal finance management, simplifies expense tracking, and offers personalized budget plans. By utilizing SMS messages and expense bills, Wonga extracts transaction data and categorizes expenses automatically. Machine learning algorithms are employed to reduce user effort and improve accuracy. By leveraging calendar events, the application predicts upcoming expenses, allowing users to devise efficient budget plans and achieve better financial decisions for long-term success.
Research Gap
The current landscape of personal finance management in Sri Lanka lacks efficient and automated solutions, leading many individuals to resort to cumbersome manual methods for tracking expenses and managing budgets. Existing systems do not adequately address the problem of accurately categorizing expenses, often requiring users to manually assign categories to their transactions. Furthermore, these systems do not leverage the potential of machine learning algorithms to reduce user effort and improve accuracy. Additionally, the absence of intelligent budget planners contributes to overspending, disorganization, and difficulty in monitoring expenses. Consequently, there is a research gap in developing a comprehensive smart solution that utilizes SMS messages and expense bills to extract transaction data, automates expense categorization, generates customized budget plans based on spending patterns, and leverages calendar events to predict upcoming expenses. By bridging this gap, individuals can achieve better financial management, avoid unexpected financial burdens, and make informed decisions for long-term financial success.
Research Problem
The financial literacy of Sri Lankans is considerably low, resulting in challenges when it comes to effectively managing personal finances. Many individuals struggle with complexities associated with money management, and the lack of comprehensive knowledge in this area further exacerbates the issue. The existing systems for expense tracking and budget planning are manual and time-consuming, requiring individuals to manually record their expenses or rely on rudimentary categorization methods. Additionally, these systems fail to provide intelligent solutions that can accurately predict and plan for upcoming expenses based on users' calendar events. As a result, there is a pressing need for a smart solution that automates personal finance management, simplifies expense tracking, and offers personalized budget plans to enhance financial health without burdening the user with extensive financial knowledge.
Objectives
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Main Objective
Aims to leverage advanced techniques such as image processing and NLP to facilitate the automatic reading and extraction of expenses from various sources, including printed bills, digital bills, handwritten bills, and SMS. This automated approach is intended to significantly reduce the need for manual data entry from users, which can be a time-consuming and error-prone process. Furthermore, by improving the system's usability, this component has the potential to streamline expense management and enhance overall productivity. As such, this module holds considerable promise for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of expense management systems across a range of industries and applications.
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Specific Objective - Smart Expense Tracker
The primary aim of the present research project is to design and develop a personal finance management mobile application that utilizes advanced features to enhance the efficiency of money management, thereby assisting users in achieving financial success without requiring any substantial knowledge of personal finance management. The mobile application will be characterized by its smart and engaging interface, which will incorporate advanced functionalities, including the ability to automatically detect bank SMS and extract details of expenses, as well as identify bill images and extract relevant expense information. The application will also feature automated expense classification and insights generation, which will be presented to users in a visually appealing manner, as well as automated budget planner components that analyze user spending patterns. Additionally, the application will include an informative chatbot feature to provide answers to users’ finance related queries. Finally, the mobile application will also incorporate a future expense prediction feature based on events planned in users' personal digital calendars.
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Specific Objective - Automated Expense Classifier
After the bill image reading and SMS extraction processes, unclassified unstructured expense data that was recorded will be used as inputs for expense classification and accurately classifies the expenses into the corresponding matching expense categories. Based on the expense data classified systems will display automated graphical representations, such as line graphs, to illustrate current variations in expense categories and how expenses affect the user's cash flow because visual representations make it simple, quick, and convenient for people with low financial literacy and language proficiency to understand how expenses behave. Furthermore, Insights will be generated based on the expense classified into expense categories. And as the user updates the application with new expenses, the amounts in expense categories will also change. Based on those variation analyses expense insights will be generated.
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Specific Objective - Custom Budget Planner & ChatBot Assistant
Aims to provide an effective way to plan next month's budget for the user by developing a system that analyses users’ past expenses, to forecast the expenses so that the system can allocate the appropriate 41 amount of money to each spending category (Food, Grocery, Bills, Personal Care, Transportation, Medicine). The system will create an effective, personalized budget plan for users. When there is a budget for each month it will be a great help because at first glance users can understand how much they are supposed to spend for each of their needs, and it will prevent users from spending money on unnecessary items as well. Also, it will provide financial assistance to users by implementing a chatbot. This chatbot is capable of answering questions that users have related to the financial landscape of Sri Lanka. The availability of reliable sources of information will help users to stay informed about financial situations.
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Specific Objective - Future Expense Minder
Aims to help users manage their finances by predicting expenses for upcoming events. It will collect real calendar event data using Google App Script and Google Calendar API, which will be triggered monthly. A survey will be conducted to gather demographic data and analyze how expenses vary across different event categories. Preprocessing techniques will be used to cleanse the natural language event data, removing noise and irrelevant information. A classification model will be built to filter monetary events from users' calendars. Expense amounts for these events will be predicted based on user demographic data, monthly income using a trained regression model, and users will be notified of the estimated budget. Users can confirm, update or ignore the predicted amount, which will be added to their budget plan. A mobile app ensuring privacy and usability will be developed, granting users permission to access calendar events and displaying predictions in an easily understandable manner with simple user interfaces.
Solution
Smart Expense Tracker
To keep track of expenses, people are usually accustomed to using manual methods like writing expenses in a book or using a mobile app and manually entering details. This can be a time-consuming task and since this is a manual process, it is error prone. When started to conduct the research on this component, there was some sort of researchers who had done related to this topic, but in there, most of the systems were developed to enter details manually only. In the first solution, the app will be tracking the daily user expenses in a more timesaving, easy approach by allowing the user to upload bills, and credit card statements obtained monthly to track expenses that are done using credit cards throughout the month by using image processing and in here this app will track daily user expenses through SMS by using NLP. This app will identify money-related transactions. Text classification and text mining technologies will be used to extract money-related transactions via SMS. OCR technology will be used for text extraction. Machine learning algorithms will be used to eliminate unnecessary data and to filter only data like amount, data, and expense name.
Automated Expense Classifier
Unclassified unstructured expense data that was recorded will be used as inputs for expense classification after the bill image reading and SMS extraction operations. The automatic classification correctly classifies the expenses into the proper matching expense categories by utilizing trained machine-learning-based Naive Bayes classification algorithms. After using text classification techniques including tokenization, and lemmatization, the classifier correctly assigns the expenses to the proper matching expense categories. Because visual representations make it easy, quick, and convenient for people with low financial literacy and language proficiency to understand how expenses behave, systems that classify expenses will automatically display graphical representations, such as line graphs, to visually illustrate current variations in expense categories and how expenses affect the user's cash flow. 43 Additionally, insights will be generated based on the categorization of expenses into expense types. Additionally, the amounts listed under spending categories will vary when the user updates the application with new expenses. Cost-related insights will be produced based on those variation studies.
Custom Budget Planner & ChatBot Assistant
One of the purpose is to develop an effective way to plan next month's budget by
arranging a personalized automatic solution for the users and assisting them by
providing valuable information about their current financial capabilities.
We have implemented an expense prediction and budget planning feature by using
ARIMA model that can accurately forecast upcoming expenses for a 15-day period.
This forecasted expense data and user’s past spending frequency for each budget
category is then utilized to create a tailored budget plan for each individual user. In
order to achieve this objective, we were required the collection of each user's expense
data, which will be used exclusively to generate their personalized budget plan.
The another objective of this research was to develop an interactive chatbot application
that can address users' inquiries pertaining to taxes in the finance domain. This goal
has been accomplished by utilizing the text-davinci-003 GPT model, which allows
users to ask questions and receive prompt and precise responses from the chatbot
component that are up-to-date.
Future Expense Minder (FEM)
The FEM is designed to Predict expenses for upcoming events planned in personal calendars such as Google Calendar to help user be more organized financially. By collecting real calendar event data and demographic information such as age, gender, employability status, marital status, province, and monthly income, the FEM processes these inputs to predict expenses for upcoming events that are likely to incur expenses to the user. A transformer-based deep learning model (distilBERT model) was trained for event classification to recognize monetary events Regression analysis is used to estimate budget amounts for each monetary event. Users are then notified of upcoming events with the system-estimated budget amount, allowing them to confirm, update, or cancel the expense in their budget plan. The output of the FEM system consists of filtered future events requiring spending, along with their predicted expense amounts, providing users with valuable insights to manage their finances effectively.
Documents & Presentations
Please find all the documents related to this project below
Individual Proposals
Research Paper
Presentations
Final Reports
About Us
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