A Personal Finance Application for Detecting Hidden and Recurring Expenses
A Personal Finance Application for Detecting Hidden and Recurring Expenses
Muralidharan V 1, Jacob Yesudass Y 2 , Agesta Jenifer A 3
1 PG-MBA & Karpagam College of Engineering – SoMS, Coimbatore, India
2 PG-MBA & Karpagam College of Engineering – SoMS, Coimbatore, India
3 UG-CSE & Holy Cross Engineering College, Thoothukudi , India
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ABSTRACT - A significant share of household spending disappears into a category that most people are only dimly aware of: recurring charges. Streaming subscriptions, cloud storage plans, gym memberships, news site auto-renewals, app store charges, and software licenses accumulate steadily in the background, often charging small amounts frequently enough that no single deduction stands out, but adding up to a meaningful sum over a month or a year. Many of these services are ones the user no longer actively uses, or did not knowingly sign up to renew. Shadow price is a proposed mobile application that analyses a user’s transaction history from bank SMS messages, UPI records, or uploaded statements to surface these hidden and recurring costs, deliver pre-renewal alerts, provide cancellation guidance, and project how much the user could save by trimming unused subscriptions. This paper presents the problem, the proposed architecture, the detection algorithm, and the practical privacy considerations involved in building a tool that works with financial transaction data.
Keywords — Hidden Expenses, Subscription Detection, Recurring Charges, Personal Finance, Expense Tracker, Auto-renewal Alert, Financial Awareness, UPI Analytics