Authors: Bacche Sanket Kailas, Prof. S. K. Said, Prof. M. C. Kolse
Abstract: Managing personal and organizational expenses with paper receipts and spreadsheets is slow, error-prone and offers little insight into spending behaviour. Cloud-based expense trackers address these problems by centralizing financial records, synchronizing them across devices and applying analytics to reveal patterns. This paper reviews the technologies behind such systems. It examines cloud service and deployment models, intelligent capture of receipts through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and document-understanding models, automatic categorization of transactions, budget forecasting and anomaly detection, and integration with banking data through consented interfaces such as India's Account Aggregator framework. Security is treated as a core requirement: the review discusses encryption in transit and at rest, multi-factor authentication, role based access control for multi-user organizations and common web-application vulnerabilities. A five-layer reference architecture is proposed that separates client applications, an API gateway, microservices, data storage and an analytics engine. A research gap analysis, objectives, comparison of storage and capture options and a discussion of challenges are presented. The review concludes that combining automated data capture with explainable analytics and strong security controls can make expense tracking both effortless and trustworthy for individuals and enterprises.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24219665
