Design and implementation of a salary disbursement-Based Personal Budgeting Application (PACE)

Many salary earners in Nigeria go through a “feast and famine” routine where they overspend after receiving salaries only to run low on cash before receiving the next salary again. Studies show that 52% of those earning salaries in Nigeria have borrowed money before receiving their salaries [1]. In addition, 45.6% of Nigerians who had tried budgeting regularly overspent [2]. Therefore, most previous PFM solutions used to help people manage money were mostly reactionary because of the lack of automation to prevent spending more than what was planned for. The project developed PACE, a personal budgeting web application that is designed using a proactive financial management model. Development of the application took place within iterations of Agile SDLC process. Technologies used for development include Next.js 16 as the framework for full-stack web application, Google Firebase Authentication and Cloud Firestore as the database, as well as Paystack and Monnify payment gateways. The project employed behavioral economics principles, which included mental accounting, loss aversion, present bias, and nudge theory, to help automate financial discipline. Finally, the resulting system could calculate daily allowance as one-thirtieth of salary in whole Naira, create individual virtual accounts to fund wallets, transfer money via bank transfers using a unified API, and automatically roll unspent daily allowances into a Savings Vault on each dashboard load. Usability testing with twelve(12) Nigerian salary earners achieved a SUS score above the 68-point threshold, a task completion rate above 80%, and a satisfaction score above 4/5, confirming technical feasibility and behavioural effectiveness.