How I Made Monas — An Expense Manager

The story began when I’m falling in love with Android. I love the way Android works and how it responds on our touch. The touch screen is immerse and that’s the time when I’m starting to be a developer.

I’m not a great developer yet, but I would like to throw all my feels and passion in this study. Monas is my second app in my study, and I really wanted it to be successful but sometimes, we can’t really predict what will happen and I hope my experiences here can help some people.

Monas is an income and expense manager, and the first time I built it because there is no easy app to manage money. I've been in money manager app business for the past 2 years, and I've been using so many apps out there, but then I realized, we’re human and sometimes we get bored with our stuff. So I threw all the apps, and I didn't want to use any money manager app again because I was bored, it’s that simple.

This is where I got an idea to build an app, a simple and less bored money manager app but how is it possible? It was based on my experience with personal finance app for the past months.

Simple

I was really trying to find the reason why I got bored with those apps, and then I know the reason, one of the thing that is really hard in personal finance app is data entry. Data entry is sometimes frustrating because we have to input a lot of data before we can add an expense or income and also sometimes we forget about it.

By the time we forget to input the data, more data, eventually we become bored and not wanted to use it anymore.

So this is what I learned, before we build an app, we understand the way the app should work and how it behaves. You can download similar apps, and find the good point where we can improve it in our app.

Monas is built with this thing in mind, and came up with simple solution and really fast data entry. Take a look on the screen

If you look on the screen, it’s really clear that we only have to input the expense and select the category then we’re done, just click on the save button. It only takes few seconds, with a simple data entry like this we reduce the possibility we forget to insert the data.

I really hope I can make it simpler, let me know if you find it can be more effective.

Features

Another thing I learned in personal finance app is features. I’ve seen a lot of apps with a lot of features, do you think a lot of features means a better app? No, not really. People might need a lot of features, but we determine what our app will be.

We might add more features in our app overtime, but do you know how it looks on the new users? It’s frustrating. I realized that when I downloaded an app that has a lot of features. Maybe it’s because its users request great features, and the developer love to implement in the app. But me, as the new user for this app are confusing on what I should do, what I need to focus first and I need to take a good time to learn for it.

This is really important, I’m trying to make user friendly app that has a really good navigation, a really simple data entry, intuitive charts, but the users complain about the app is confusing. For me, it looks simple and easy to use, but guess what it doesn’t mean so for everyone.

So, when we’re about to add a feature, think about it again. Is this feature in line with our vision on what our app will be? if not, the drop it but give something better and in line with our vision.

People request a lot of features, but sometimes we have a better way to handle this and I’m trying to explain it to the users to let them know that we have a better way.

Let’s take a look on the sample Monas again, I know Monas is about how we manage money, and then I should know where the app is focusing on. Because this is money manager app, then I think it should focus on the reports. This is the goal why people use personal finance app, isn’t it? Then I tell the users, that we’re focusing on the reports.

So I really care about this and try to give the best reports as possible.

Seem great, aren’t they?

This is just my little story, I have another story about how I market this app.