PRODUCT DOCUMENT · CURRENT PRODUCT BASELINE
Product Requirements Document
GastosWise is a student spending decision-support system for planning limited funds, prioritizing upcoming expenses, and reviewing spending over time.
1. Product overview
Students often need to balance essentials, school costs, transport, personal spending, and savings against a limited budget. GastosWise brings those planning details together and offers a transparent starting point for deciding what to fund first.
The product organizes student-entered financial records and applies configurable decision-support criteria to eligible pending expenses. Recommendations are informational: the student remains responsible for choices, and the system does not move money or guarantee financial outcomes.
2. Product goals
- Give students a clear view of available budget, planned expenses, actual spending, and savings goals.
- Help students compare expense priorities using understandable, consistent criteria.
- Keep recommendation reasoning and funding outcomes reviewable, including saved recommendation history.
- Provide practical reports while keeping personal financial records scoped to their owner.
- Give administrators the tools to maintain categories, decision-support settings, account status, and system operations.
3. Users and needs
Student
Needs to plan a budget period, record expected and actual expenses, understand priority suggestions, compare purchases, monitor savings, and review reports.
Administrator
Needs to manage student account status, expense categories, decision-support configuration, application settings, activity records, and backups without routine access to students’ personal financial details.
4. Functional requirements
| ID | Requirement | Expected behavior |
|---|---|---|
| FR-01 | Account access | Students can register and sign in; access to student and administrator functions is role-restricted. |
| FR-02 | Budget planning | Students can create and review budgets by period. Recommendations use remaining funds as their allocation limit. |
| FR-03 | Expense management | Students can record upcoming expenses with estimated cost, category, importance, urgency, essentiality, deadline, and whether partial funding is appropriate. |
| FR-04 | Decision support | The system scores and ranks eligible pending expenses using configured criteria, explains recommendations, respects available funds, and identifies unfunded or partially funded items. |
| FR-05 | Recommendation history | Generated plans and the criteria used are retained for review. Actual spending is recorded separately and is not inferred from a recommendation. |
| FR-06 | Purchase comparison | Students can compare alternatives using price, quality, and usefulness to inform a purchase decision. |
| FR-07 | Savings goals | Students can define savings goals and record contributions toward them. |
| FR-08 | Reports | Students can review date-filtered category spending and planned-versus-actual information, and export supported report data as CSV or print it. |
| FR-09 | Administration | Administrators can manage accounts, categories, decision-support weights and thresholds, application settings, activity logs, and backups. |
5. Decision-support rules
- The default criteria weights are importance 35%, urgency 25%, deadline proximity 25%, and essentiality 15%. Administrators can adjust the weights while keeping their total at 100%.
- Classification thresholds are configurable and must remain in descending order.
- Eligible pending expenses are ranked by score. Allocation does not exceed available funds; partial allocation is only offered for expenses explicitly marked divisible.
- Recommendations support student judgment and are not financial advice, transactions, or guarantees.
6. Quality and privacy requirements
- Ownership: student budgets, expenses, savings, and recommendation records must remain scoped to the signed-in owner.
- Access control: administrator and student capabilities must be protected by role checks.
- Clarity: recommendation criteria and outcomes should be understandable, and planned amounts must remain distinct from recorded transactions.
- Usability: core pages should remain usable across desktop and mobile layouts and support accessible labels and navigation.
- Configurability: administrators can maintain decision-support criteria and selected application-wide settings without changing individual student plans.
7. Success measures
Product evaluation should focus on whether students can complete key planning tasks and understand the output. Suggested measures include successful budget and expense setup, recommendation review and history usage, report export completion, and user feedback on recommendation clarity. Baselines and numeric targets should be established from observed usage rather than assumed in this document.
8. Scope boundaries and assumptions
- The product is a planning and decision-support application; it does not connect to bank accounts, initiate payments, or move funds.
- Recommendations depend on the accuracy of student-entered data and administrator-configured criteria.
- Actual spending and savings contributions are explicitly recorded and kept distinct from planned or recommended amounts.
- Deployment-specific service levels, retention periods, and regulatory commitments are outside this product baseline and must be defined before a hosted production launch.