Up-to-date Budgeting with the iPhone

Software Development and Database

Senior Design I

Proposal

Lawrence Powers

Topics of Discussion

• Introduction to the problem• Solutions that already exist• Limitations of current solutions• The proposed solution• The proposed high level design• Project timeline and budget• Conclusion

Current Solutions

• Mint.com– Connects directly to bank accounts, investment

accounts, and credit/loan accounts.

• Quicken– Similar to Mint.com except it’s a paid service.

• Intuit, Quicken’s parent company, recently acquired Mint.com.

The Problem

• It is more important for Americans to budget today than it was in recent years.

• Why?

• “Credit card use in America continues to drop at an unprecedented rate. In September, credit card debt, dropped 13% again, after falling 13% in August.” –Kimberly Amadeo, About.com

Limitations of Solutions

• Outdated– Services like mint, only gather transactions

that have posted to your credit/bank account.

• Slow– Downloading new transactions takes minutes.

• Limited Features– iPhone application cannot edit budgets.

Proposed Solution

• iPhone client with server backend– Pending Authorizations will be included in

budget considerations. Check Register?– Application is meant strictly for budgeting

checking accounts with a debit card attached.

– Fifth Third Bank will be the first supported in the prototype.

Proposed Solution (cont)– Incoming transactions can be tagged immediately after

purchase. Budget categories are updated accordingly.

– Budgets are based on the 0 based budget• Income – outgo = 0• Amount for savings is included in the outgo• Increase budget for one category by x, you must decrease

another category by x.

– Simple statistical analysis will be performed on spending habits.

Proposed Design

• Software components– Bank web site scraping module that

downloads transactions from the bank.– Transaction module that keeps track of

transactions.– Budgeting module that keeps track of

budgets.

Proposed Design (cont)

– iPhone client module

• The iPhone module will communicate with the other modules through web services.

Technologies (software)Solution Price Actual Price Comments

Ubuntu Server 9.10 $0.00 $0.00 Under GPLv2 license

PHP 5.3.1 $0.00 $0.00 Under GPLv2 license

cURL $0.00 $0.00 Under GPLv2 license

OpenSSL $0.00 $0.00 Under GPLv2 license

PEAR $0.00 $0.00 Under GPLv2 license

MySQL 5.1 $0.00 $0.00 Under GPLv2 license

Xcode $0.00 $0.00 Price included with hardware

Mac OS 10.6 $0.00 $0.00 Price included with hardware

Iphone OS 3.1 $0.00 $0.00 Price included with hardware

Developer license $99.99 $99.99 Needed in order to develop on the iPhone

Total $99.99 $99.99

Technologies (hardware)Hardware Price Actual Price Comments

MacBook Pro $1199 $1099 Student Discount

Custom server – E6700 core 2 duo with 4 gigabytes of ram and 250 Gigabytes of RAID 5 storage

$1500 $1500 System built a few years ago

iPhone 3G $99 $99

Total $2,798 $2,798

Timeline

Challenges

• Security– Bank’s passwords are stored in plain text.– Jail broken iPhones can be vulnerable if

default SSH password is left unchanged.– Not registered with third party security

company. Ex. Verisign

User Profile

• The User– Must have a credit or debit card with online

banking.– Must have a iPhone, any version

Risk Management

Testing Plan

• Integration testing

• Module testing

• Stress Testing

• Performance Testing

• Network Testing

Deliverables

• Application is able to retrieve both pending and posted transactions of account– XML, objective-c, iphone SDK, web services

• Application is able to accept new and modify existing budgets– XML, objective-c, iphone SDK, web services

Design Protocol

Conclusion

• There is a need for mobile budgeting in order to make real time decisions.

• This application needs to be:– Fast– Up-to-date– Feature filled

Additional Information

– Questions?– Additional project information

• ucseniordesign.blogspot.com

– Email• powersln@email.uc.edu