Lotus

Hi Everyone,

We all know that managing expenses can be a really tenacious task. If you pair those expenses with variable income rates from different sources, and at different times, or rising prices in your monthly purchase list, you suddenly face a whole new group of variables that get in your way and make your life harder than it should be.

Lotus, briefly describing, is a budgeting and expenses management application for your household. Why Lotus? Lotus, like the flower of the same name, is metaphorically speaking floating on top of a body of water. It is a beacon of tranquillity and serenity. Managing your expenses should be like that.

To communicate this vision, I’ve created a concept that would strive to provide in a single screen most of what is needed to get peace of mind and make sure that you’re managing your expenses efficiently. A centralized solution.

For a centralized solution, and since bills, expenses, and other financial information is each other interlinked, I’ve came to the conclusion that having a dashboard interface would make the most sense under these conditions.

Before expenses, there are bills, so the left-most panel provides an interactive calendar to get an overview of what is most urgent, like overdue bills.

After bills, we have expenses (middle panel). These expenses are listed in a categorized format so that you can quickly understand where your money is going in a given timeframe (current month for example).

You can also have access to budgeting tactics, with a master budget being at the top of the expenses, quickly providing an outlook of where you’re currently at in spending, and how much is yet left in your monthly budgeting buffer.

Of course, all this is useless, if you don’t understand your financial situation deeply. The right-most panel provides reporting of your net income in multiple time ranges. This essentially allows you to get an understanding of how much you’re making per month, and how much you’re spending in proportion.

Visualizations are an interesting way to quickly understand intuitively and immediately multiple concepts. Spending is absolutely important to understand, and pie charts are a simple way to quickly compare variations in your spending within multiple categories. It is also organized from the most spent category, to the least spent category, so it can be easier to hierarchically get which of the categories of expenses are essentially eating your budget the most.

Obviously, above all this, we must know where and how many assets we currently have available to support our spending obligations. The bottom-right-most module showcases a summary of your accounts, with a quick way to check out the most recent transactions.

Lotus could theoretically be translated to a business scenario, but I’ve wanted to keep it simple and provide for now just the demonstration of a household use case.

Please make sure you check out the @2x preview and the attachments.

Attachments:
lotus-2x.png