Budget Buddy

A website that helps users add monthly incomes and allocate a budget for categories, like food, transportation, etc. Algorithms will analyze the budget input and give recommendations for budget.

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Inspiration

-Budget Buddy was inspired by a former project to analyze financial trends for the global economy in recent years. Due to the pandemic, and other factors the financial world has been changing dramatically, leading to an increase in poverty and bankruptcy rates. This led us to create a website to promote and help to budget.

What it does

  • Budget Buddy allows users to input monthly income and spending on necessities such as transportation, food, insurance, and other vital costs. From there, Budget Buddy runs it's algorithm to find out how to maximize savings and promote healthy habits for users. Users can input their current spending manually or through an image file.

How we built it

  • We focused 4 main aspects, the algorithm itself, the image scan, reading json files, and the front end HTML. For the algorithm, we used Javascript and using input of current spending from the HTML itself and calculated optimized savings and more. For the image scan, using Google Cloud Vision API, we were able to implement high accuracy text recognition from the image input. We read the json file using the fs library, and made the data given from the image usable on our side. Lastly for the front end, we used HTML, CSS, and Javascript to create a interactive, user friendly, front end for Budget Buddy.

Challenges we ran into

  • Our main challenge was correctly applying the image scan, and getting correct text from said files. We originally started by using the Tessaract API, but we faced issues with time, as it took over 10 minutes for a single file, and accuracy, as the text we were returned was extremely different to the text on the input image file.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We are proud as our website fits the Section 508 plan, meaning our website is very user friendly and accessible for all users, despite of personal visual disabilities such as color blindness, etc. -We are also proud of the various methods users can input their personal spending data.

What we learned

  • We have learned quite a lot during this process. Specifically how to use APIs to recognize the text of images, to apply buttons and store data so that users can go back to our site with a login-based system, and lastly how to read multiple kinds of files, such as JSON.

What's next for Budget Buddy

  • The future of Budget Buddy is quite bright, as we plan to implement where fully autonomous algorithms that can give financial tips/ advice to users using AI and ML.

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