When nothing is left at the end of the month, I want to know where the money went, so I am not guessing about my own household's spending.

Job context

Who

Whoever keeps the household's money

When

At each month end

Trigger

A month with unchanged income and nothing left

Situation

Money moves through several accounts and several people

Constraints

Nobody in the house wants to record every item

5 Pains

• Spending is scattered across accounts

  High

  Cash, cards, wallets, each holding a piece.

  Root cause: Each payment method keeps its own ledger

• Tracking lasts a few weeks

  High

  The effort exceeds what it returns.

  Root cause: Recording costs daily effort while the payoff appears after months

• Several people in the house spend

  High

  Nobody sees the whole picture.

  Root cause: There is no shared ledger everyone writes to

• Small amounts add up to a large one

  Medium

  And none of them is memorable.

  Root cause: A small expense triggers no deliberation

• Money conversations at home turn into arguments

  Medium

  So many households do not have them.

  Root cause: Discussing spending reads as judging the spender

5 Desired Outcomes

• See all spending in one place

  Functional

• Track without recording by hand

  Functional

• Have the household see one picture

  Social

• See the small amounts totalled

  Functional

• Discuss money without an argument

  Social

5 Existing Solutions

A solution is not the same thing as a product, a customer can hire a behaviour or a workaround too.

• Keep a notebook or spreadsheet

  Workaround

  Gives the fullest picture, and almost nobody keeps it past a few weeks.

• Use an app that reads bank transactions

  Product

  Removes the manual work and cannot see cash.

• Put all spending on one card

  Behaviour

  The most effective way to unify the ledger, requiring the household to change habits.

• Set limits by category

  Behaviour

  Keeps the total bounded, requiring you to already know where the money goes.

• Hold a monthly household money conversation

  Behaviour

  The only way everyone sees the same thing, needing a form that keeps it from becoming judgement.

2 Opportunity Gaps

• Each payment method keeps its own ledger while a household's picture lives in the space between all of them, owned by no institution.

  Why existing solutions fail: Every bank and wallet wants to be the place the user looks, so none has a reason to merge its data with a rival's, and the user is the only party who needs the whole picture and the only one without the power to assemble it.

  Potential opportunity: A user-controlled aggregation reading from every source, rather than waiting for a provider to open up.

• Banks keep ledgers per account because an account is what they open, while the unit money is actually managed in is a household, which exists in no system.

  Why existing solutions fail: Every financial product is designed around an individual because liability attaches to an individual, so a household must assemble the pieces by hand, and that is work assigned to nobody.

  Potential opportunity: A household view merging several people and several accounts into one picture.