AccomWhiz

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  A screen where landlords can see a summary of all the properties they handle.

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  A screen showing more information about a specific properties such as the tenants living there and rent payments.

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  A screen that shows landlords specific information about a tenant. Such as history of payments.

Inspiration

As we are all university students, one of the major things that we have to think about is managing our finances and sorting out housing. We already have the stress of handling lectures, seminars, coursework and finding time to socialise with friends and family. So we decided to create a solution that eases one of our problems. Initially, our idea revolved around banking and finance management. But focusing on housing means that we can not only help university students but house-shares all across the country and fill in this much-needed gap in the market.

What it does

Our app greatly simplifies the process of making payments and communicating between the tenants and landlord in a house share. Traditionally you have a lead tenant who is the main point of contact between the letting agency or any landlords. This places a lot of stress on the individual who is the lead tenant. Our app decentralises responsibility and makes things much easier. Each tenant is responsible for paying their portion of the rent and the landlord can quickly track payments and information across all their different properties. Tenants can put any complaints on the app and the landlord can see this directly, landlords can contact tenants who haven't paid rent yet, all within the app.

How we built it

We decided to focus on developing for iOS. The main technologies we used were Swift and Objective-C. This meant that we could develop quickly and see what our app looked and functioned like with the iOS Simulator.

Challenges we ran into

Our team members had different skill sets and levels of fluency. At the start, it meant that it was hard to make real progress with the project since people were comfortable with different things. We fixed this challenge by strategically dividing up tasks so each team member could contribute to the project fully and engage.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Finding a real problem and gap in the market that exists and creating something which would help so many across the country. Students like ourselves but also anyone who is house sharing will be able to make managing all these stressful details a lot easier. We are also proud of being able to bond as a team over such a short period of time, even though our main method of communication was virtual and Discord.

What we learned

Find a real problem. Don't be afraid to change direction and idea when it doesn't work out. Make the solution simple and effective.

What's next for AccomWhiz

The two main things that we are aiming to develop is creating an Android version of the app. So we are able to help more people and reach a wider audience. We also focused on implementing the key features during the time we were given to code. The second thing we would improve is the user experience and making sure every feature in the app directly provides value.

Built With

• objective-c
• swift
• swiftui
• xcode