Trackspends is a Bangalore based startup looking to solve personal finance problem in Indian space mostly around tracking and analyzing personal expenses. The biggest problem in this space is how to track your expenses especially if you have 60-70 percent of cash transactions. Once you have solved this problem you can do better personal finance planning and learn a lot about your finances and how to manage it.

According to the firm, SMS is the way to go as it is the most widespread/simplest/cheapest media in India and will grow further and grow cheaper. Anytime and anywhere you are, you have SMS accessibility whether its malls, shopping complex, and traveling; basically on the go data upload.

What Trackspends has done is, used this to solve user's expense tracking problem, how it works: User has to register online with his mobile number in trackspends.com (He can also add more mobiles to same account for example User and his spouse wants to track combined expenses from both their mobiles). Once registered he/she sends SMS messages for each spends as "Rs. 100 petrol" or "Rs. 100 in books, Rs. 20 in parking" (Comma separated spends in single SMS) from his mobile. We process this SMS, extract the spends and update it in user's account. We consolidate overall spends month wise/category wise etc and once user logs in he can view spends/expenses details.

The company has been launched currently in first phase and has got a very positive response. Currently it is adding more analytics (Category wise) and also updating its user interface.

The major differentiator is the SMS based approach and keeping it simple. The firm is not mixing all the different ways of tracking, that sites ask to update/track either in mobile app, email, social apps, Google chat, and a lot of different ways of tracking. This creates a lot of confusion and it becomes difficult. If we solve the tracking problem properly coming up with analytics and categories is already a solved problem. The firm is also looking at integrating and uploading bank/credit card accounts data so that it can collaborate it with the spends.

Its target customers are any average urban Indian and above, be it professionals, house wives, students. If used properly, each user will benefit a lot by tracking and learning their expenses/spends. In the next couple of months, it is looking at growing this in full scale and catering all the cities (With local mobile numbers in each city and SMS package based approach), business/revenue model wise it will be ads, lead gen based for financial products and premium services for analytics/free SMS among other things)