Spence
About project
Spence is a mobile finance manager and predictor that I designed and developed to make everyday money tracking simpler, clearer, and more useful. The app combines an intuitive interface with practical tools for recording expenses, monitoring spending patterns, visualizing financial activity, and forecasting future outcomes.
Built with Flutter and Firebase, Spence also explores smarter interactions through receipt scanning, data-driven insights, and personalized predictions. The project brought together product design, mobile development, backend integration, and machine learning within one complete financial experience overall.
Overview
Spence is a mobile finance manager and predictor that I designed and developed to make everyday money tracking simpler, clearer, and more useful. The app combines an intuitive interface with practical tools for recording expenses, monitoring spending patterns, visualizing financial activity, and forecasting future outcomes.
Tech Stack
The Problem
Most expense trackers are good at one thing: telling you where your money already went. Logging is tedious, so people quit after a week or two, and the charts only ever explain the past. I wanted recording to take seconds and the history to turn into a useful look at next month.
Identity
Primary
Poppins
Secondary
Poppins Medium
Accent
Urbanist
Process
Research
Reviewed studies on machine learning for personal finance forecasting and ran interviews
Define
Mapped the core flows: add an expense, scan a receipt, review the month, see the forecast
Design
Wireframes to high-fidelity prototypes in Figma and component library with a mascot
Build
Flutter app with Firebase sign-in and Firestore sync, plus on-device receipt text recognition
Model
Trained a forecasting model on categorized spending to predict next month per category
Test
Usability sessions with classmates, then iterations on entry speed and chart clarity
Experience
Record ExpenseRecord Expense
Learnings
L01
entry flow mattered more than the algorithm
L02
Explaining a prediction is as much design work as making it
L03
Owning design and code end to end makes trade-offs faster
Outcomes
Spence shipped as a complete app and as the working proof of my research paper: the forecasts run inside the product, not in a notebook.
Next Project
J / K
P111
Glance