Budget Bee

BeeScore
Launch page
Survey pages

Inspiration:

As college students, we strive to manage our money well and be able to survive semester by semester without the constant stress of wondering if we can afford our next meal or textbook. With that goal in mind, we've turned to many budgeting apps and extensions like Rocket Money, Mint, and YNAB. However, after testing these platforms, we found that they either overwhelmed us with too many features we didn't need, lacked the real-time feedback we craved, or simply didn't fit the unique financial challenges of college life.

We realized what we really needed was a budgeting tool that understood our reality: unpredictable expenses, limited income from part-time jobs or student loans, and the constant temptation of impulse purchases. We wanted something that wouldn't just track our spending passively, but would actively keep us accountable with a clear, easy-to-understand score that updates in real-time.

That's how Budget Bee was born. We envisioned a tool that would work with us, a little buddy, to help us. One that would celebrate our wins when we stay within budget and gently nudge us back on track when we're veering off course. By integrating directly with our bank transactions and providing an intuitive scoring system, Budget Buddy transforms budgeting from a tedious chore into an engaging experience that empowers us to make smarter financial decisions every single day.

What it does/How we built it:

First you login/create an account so that your information is saved. Then if this is your first time, you will input your budget for different categories which can be changed whenever. Then your financial information (transactions) will be uploaded to the app and using your bank transactions (money spent) and your budget, a Bee Score will be created. This is an interactive score as it will go up or down with the amount of money spent in the month. The score will reset every month! We made the interactive and working prototype on Figma and did the backend using python. Everything is located on GitHub!

Challenges we ran into:

At first we wanted to utilize a third party system to manage bank transactions since it is never a good idea to handle sensitive data directly. However, due to the limitations of this project, time constraints and API access restrictions, we instead created a “fake bank” to simulate bank transactions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

We are proud of producing an application that we would actually use. It's one thing to create something, but another to create something that we all love and this project allowed us to come together and work on an app for the community. We enjoyed coming up with the idea of budgeting but in a tailored way for an individual. I loved that we were able to utilize our previous skills with python and Figma to make a simple yet powerful tool .

What we learned:

We learned how to decide on a application flow when there is 1,000,000 to each idea.

What's next for Budget Bee:

We aim to eventually incorporate a third party service such as Plaid to handle bank transactions and link our backend to our front-end to have the chance to deploy the application.