A personal finance app allows you to manage your finances electronically without going through multiple paper bills. Therefore, such applications have become much more popular. It is much more convenient to control the budget and monitor the movement of funds.

Having decided to develop an application for personal finance, you should ensure that it is competitive and able to attract a large user audience and have a unique feature, or an entire concept, that is different from other apps on the market. Therefore, monitoring of competitive offers is necessary.

In addition, it is recommended that the banking sector has gained a foothold in this area, providing functionality for budget management in its applications. Therefore, there are additional competitors for the new project. But it may be of interest to one of the banks or fintech businesses.

There is a list of main functionality of this application:

• control of expenses and income;
• possibility of budgeting;
• monitoring of accounts;
• tips about funds saving;
• planning and spending wisely;
• carrying out analyses and preparing financial statements.

Thus, the personal finance application allows a convenient and efficient way to control and manage financial resources.

Types of applications for financial management

Simple applications

This type of application requires users to enter personal or financial information manually. In addition, the user will need to manually designate the expense category of any purchase (or income). It is the simplest method of monitoring expenses, budgeting, and investing.

Advantages of the application: there are no security risks, and the developed app will be inexpensive.

Disadvantages: a high probability of errors when entering manually and the inconvenience of this method of entering information.

Complex Applications

Such applications have a more complex structure because they use automatic processes for managing user finances. Information about the movement of funds on cards, accounts and electronic wallets is automatically synchronized with the application.

The advantages of the applications: the application is feature-rich and efficient to use and provides the ability to update online.

Disadvantages include: depending on the range of included services, the cost of developing such a product may be higher than the planned budget.

The process of creating personal finance applications

Now, let’s look deeper at what steps are needed to create a personal finance application from scratch. Remember that only the basic steps are shown here. You can find out the detailed process here: https://qarea.com/industries/banking-and-finance.

Find out user needs and study competitors

Gather feedback from your potential users on what they don’t like about existing products. Monitoring competition and user needs is the first stage of development.

Purpose of the application

Before development, it is necessary to decide precisely what problem the created product will solve—for example, introducing new technologies that ensure comfortable application use and achieving set goals. For this purpose, you can conduct regular AB testing, offering potential users different products, thereby finding out the real demand.

Security

Since such applications directly deal with financial assets and confidential information, a high level of security should be provided.

Here’s a list of things that can ensure high security:

• two-level user identification when logging into an account;
• session restrictions;
• do not use visible fonts to display users’ personal information;
• apply PCI DSS – security standard for payment cards and GDPR – general information protection requirements.

Think over a functional set

First, create a list of functions that you plan to add in the application, including:

• user registration should be fast, uncomplicated, and as secure as possible;
• provide a user profile for the ability to correct primary data;
• financial management (income/expenses) – provides the opportunity to control the movement of financial resources;
• notifications – it is recommended to enable various reminders about upcoming expenses and notifications about changes in the application operating system (updates, new functions, etc.).

You can also use additional best finance app features, such as linking bank accounts, generating reports, etc.

Selecting a Technology Stack

At this stage, it is necessary to decide on the tools and technologies used during development: databases, libraries, frameworks, programming languages, etc. The choice will also be influenced by the type of mobile apps: native or cross-platform.

An important aspect is creating an interface that directly interacts with the user audience. Therefore, the interface must be clear and comfortable to use. Using HTML, CSS, and Java Script in parallel with frameworks is recommended.

The internal part of the software is required to perform high-speed loading transfers and ensure security, and the database is needed to process information quickly. APIs and AI process integration can also be used.

Think over the application design

It is recommended to take advantage of the user experience, and then the application will combine all the necessary functions and ensure comfortable use. It is better to prefer a simple user interface than a design with bright and intricate fonts. The main thing is a clear display of the necessary information. Also, consider a proper registration process.

Testing application

Upon completing the development of a minimum viable product, it is necessary to conduct thorough testing to identify errors and weaknesses in the software. Benefits of offshore testing includes the conducting of high-quality testing results with a quite cheap market price. Testing is similar to checking various applications, but finance-related applications should be tested to the highest quality.

What testing includes:

• ensuring a high degree of security;
• checking the integration and functionality of the interface;
• usability testing;
• safety of the database;
• API and system testing;
• performance – the ability to scale the software;
• stress test – check the application will handle a large number of users at the same time.

The high quality of the developed application might be guaranteed with the right approach and high-quality execution of all conditions and the quality of third-party suppliers involved.