The goal of this website is to allow students to easily track and visualize their personal finances by simply taking a photo of their receipts or invoices. The system will automatically populate the data—such as store name, date, total, and category—into an expense tracker dashboard that manages ongoing expenses and cash balance. Students will also have the option to manually input their income to calculate and monitor their net balance over time.
This site is primarily aimed at college students who want to develop better budgeting habits without the need for complex financial tools. It’s designed for individual use, but includes an optional feature that allows users to share their spending data anonymously, contributing to a community dataset of prices and habits among students.
The data will come from user-uploaded receipts and manually entered information. Using OCR (optical character recognition), the system will extract text from images to auto-fill expense details such as vendor, category, and amount. Users can also input recurring income (like part-time jobs or scholarships) to see net income trends. If enabled, anonymized expense data from multiple users can be compared to show insights such as which grocery stores have lower average prices or what times rideshare services tend to be cheaper.
Below is the initial schema for the Student Expense Tracker. It includes tables for expenses, receipts, and expense_items to link uploaded images with extracted line items.
Each student has a private dashboard with monthly and yearly summaries, auto-generated charts, and smart alerts for when expenses exceed their budget. Optionally, students can opt-in to share certain spending categories with the wider student community to help create a collective cost-of-living index around USC.
The following short video explains the vision and functionality of the Student Expense Tracker: