ProjectProposal-RoryMartin
From CS160 User Interfaces Fa06
Problem Description: Have you ever written a check? Do you balance your checkbook once a month? Most people seem to have time to write checks, but too few people seem to find the time to balance their checkbooks. Balancing your checkbook verifes that your records, i.e. your checkbook register, matches your monthly bank statement. You may think that in this day and age balancing your checkbook is obsolete, after all you can just look at the electronic transaction records online; however, sometimes your bank makes errors, and there is generally only a 60 day period in which you can notify the bank of such an error. It is more likely that you will make an arithmetic error in your checkbook register, which can lead you to believe that you have more money in your account than you actually do. If you make a mistake or forget to include your ATM withdrawals and debit card purchases, you may start bouncing checks and incurring late fees. In general, a returned check will cost you $25, not including whatever late fees incur due to your lateness in payment, e.g. at my apartment complex late rent is an extra $10 a day, if it takes a week to figure out that a check bounced, that's at least $70. If there is a problem with your checking account, it can be very difficult to go back through several months of transactions to figure out where the error occurred. If you balance your checkbook on a regular basis, you just need to look over the last month.
Target User Group: Anyone that has trouble balancing their checkbook or would like to make balancing their checkbook easier. This is a product that should be used by everyone who uses a checkbook and a debit card. It is ideal for people who are financially irresponsible and would like to better themselves about keeping track of what they spend.
Problem Context and Forces: The most common way to keep track of your day-to-day financial transactions is to record them in your checkbook register. The checkbook register comes free with your checks and is small enough to be carried around with your checkbook while being large enough to record all of your transactions. The downside to the checkbook register is that the spacing is cramped and can be hard to find what you are looking for. In order to make looking over your transaction records more accessible, you can use a accounting program such as quicken, which requires you to manually input all the records from your register into a spreadsheet. This is not a viable solution, since it requires more work than maintaining your checkbook by hand. Users never like entering the same data twice, what it is written on the check probably won't be written again. Often times, when someone writes a check they are at the supermarket or another commercial location in which their is a generally a line of people that are waiting to pay for their goods. In haste, people can forget to record their transactions in their register or make mistakes, throwing their balance off.
Solution Sketch:
My solution to the problem of checkbook balancing, is to print checks on the anoto paper. When someone writes a check, all pertinent information will be copied into a spreadsheet using OCR handwritten character recognition. The spreadsheet will automatically calculate the current balance of the account separating withdrawals from credits. This spreadsheet can then be compared against the online or printed monthly statement from your bank. If the bank statement is delivered in a standardized form, such as for quicken, then the checkbook can use automated reconciliation by comparing the recipient's name with the dollar amount of the transaction.
