A User-Driven Hybrid Expense Management Framework Integrating Digital Payments and Cash Diary for Budget Monitoring

The rapid growth of digital payment applications has transformed the way individuals manage daily financial transactions. However, most existing payment platforms primarily focus on transaction processing and provide limited support for accurate expense tracking and personalized budget management. Automatic expense categorization often leads to misclassification, and cash transactions are usually excluded, resulting in incomplete financial analysis. To address these limitations, this research proposes a user-driven hybrid expense management system that integrates digital payment transactions with manual cash diary entries. The proposed system allows users to select expense categories at the time of payment and define personalized monthly budget limits for each category. Both digital and cash expenses are recorded in a unified framework, enabling real-time category-wise monitoring of cash inflow and outflow. This approach improves expense categorization accuracy, enhances financial transparency, and increases user awareness of spending behavior. The system also supports timely identification of overspending patterns, helping users maintain better budget discipline. The proposed solution is suitable for personal finance management applications and can be effectively used by individuals who rely on both digital payments and cash transactions. Overall, the system provides a practical and user-centric approach to expense tracking and budget monitoring.