Inspiration
As students, we often struggle to track our spending. Between classes, jobs, and personal responsibilities, budgeting tends to fall through the cracks — even when money is tight. We wanted to create a tool that makes personal finance effortless, automated, and accessible to anyone facing this challenge.
What it does
Our app connects to a mock banking environment (using Plaid Sandbox), fetches recent transactions, and automatically classifies them into an Excel file. This allows users — especially students — to instantly visualize where their money is going without spending hours sorting receipts or statements.
How we built it
We used Python to interface with the Plaid Sandbox API. The application fetches user transactions, parses them into useful categories (e.g. food, transport, entertainment), and writes them to an Excel sheet using openpyxl. Everything runs locally and simulates real-time banking behavior without using real credentials.
Challenges we ran into
We never really used python before (yeah we know that's crazy) so we had to install it and leard the basics really fast. We also had a lot of difficulties to understand plaid's API.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We built a fully functional prototype that simulates banking integration and helps students automate an otherwise tedious task. We're proud that it works end-to-end: from connection to mock account, to Excel report generation — all in just a few hours.
What we learned
We learned how to work with Plaid’s developer APIs and how to deal with rapid debugging under time pressure. We also learned how to structure a clean Python project that performs automated data transformation and export, while handling authentication and configuration securely.
What's next for BMS Finances
We’d love to add:
-A web dashboard to visualize data dynamically -Budgeting suggestions based on spending habits -CSV/Google Sheets sync -Real banking integration using OAuth (with user consent) -A mobile version so students can check their budget anywhere
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