Broke Besties

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Inspiration

While brainstorming what to implement for our project, we pulled inspiration from both the NCR APIs and our own experiences, figuring out how problems we've dealt with on a a day to day basis could be addressed with certain APIs. In this process, we identified how difficult it is to be financially literate and responsible and hoped to create something that assisted individuals in being so.

What it does

Specifically speaking, Broke Besties is a web app that helps users manage their spendings given a certain budget said user would have inputted in the registration process. It aims to visualize and organize user spending, so users, themselves, can see where it is they spend the majority of their money, where they can hold back spending, and when it's necessary to spend versus splurge. There are two main functions to Broke Besties, the first of which utilizes the NCR cheque scanning API to scan and analyze receipts for the amount spent at a given institution. The second function is the actual visualization of the data. Essentially, the user has to register to use the web app, so their registration data gets saved with how much money they spent, where they spent it, and an overarching tag to classify it under. All of this information is showcased through a table that actively updates itself.

How we built it

We split into two teams, one for the front end, using HTML and CSS, and one for the back end, using Python and PHP. The front end team, went in first and designed the basic HTML skeleton, so that the backend team could populate it with data as necessary. While that happened, the backend team started figuring out how to implement the API and collect and store the data.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into quite a few challenges, some of which inhibited the full ability of our product. These included not being able to do full OCR integration with JS, further budget and save features (calendars overlays, goal deviations, etc), implement a point reference system, and the launch a full app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

However, we're proud we managed to implement the OCR, add user registration and login, add saving goals, and add expense tags .

What we learned

In this entire process we learned the importance of being able to work together well while maintaining our focus on developing a minimum viable product as opposed to losing focus on a host of smaller features.