Budgetlock and “Please top me up”

Forcing you to be disciplined with your spending,not allowing you to adopt bad spending habits. To top that an easier way to ask friends to send you some cash or remind them of that debt they owe you.

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Inspiration

As a student I’m always getting carried away in my spending, especially on the day my allowance gets in. I have always thought if only I could lock money for essentials and not be able to use it unless I’m paying for those essentials. A way to force me to always spend my money responsibly. That is what inspired budget Lock. The I’ll discipline and bad spending people the majority of people have that they end up scrapping for essentials mid months because they overspent on the wrong things. What inspired that “please top me up” feature was simply the time me and my friends shared an Uber and we didn’t use the split fare as not all of us had the app. After the ride we wanted to pay the person who paid for the Uber. The troubles of getting the person’s account number, adding them to our banking apps and paying them was so tedious and it just made me think, what if with a press of a button you could remind all your friends of the money they owed you and with the press of the button they can pay you right away. Not only saving time but eliminating possibilities of errors that could occur when sending accounts number and writing them down to make transactions

What it does

In simple terms budget lock uses a 2 key system to unlock a vault you use to save money for essentials. When you save money in the vault it asks you which essential your money is being locked for (e.g Groceries, Transport, Rent..etc). This will then lock the amount and you won’t be able to use this money unless you’re at an affiliated store. Grocery stores will be affiliated with the Grocery wallet and so on. This means any amount locked for a certain essential can only be used to make purchases at stores that sell those essentials. Please Top me up is a simple feature that sends an sms message to a person who owes you money or whom you’d like to send you some money. When you press the button you just put in the person’s contact number and choose whether you want them to pay what they owe you or just top you up. This will automatically send a message to the user giving them your banking details and a link to make the payment you asked for. Thus making the whole process of payments between friends and families, even debtors much smoother and easier.

How we built it

We built budget lock on the Celo page and we used react to build it. We first created the UI on the code and after the UI was fully functional we started working on the back end processes and configuring different functions to carry do the work. With please Top me up we had to first build a standalone app that send the message. It worked there then we just included a button on our celo build to include the functionality. We use the twilio servers to facilitate the sending of messages. Our app calls the Twilio servers and gives it the information of the user and the automated message is then sent to the said recipient.

Challenges we ran into

Our greatest challenge was configuring the Celo framework. There were many errors with dependencies and installations we had to do extensive research on some of the concepts used to fully understand and try to fix our problems. We also faced a major problem with that no one in our team knew React so we had to learn it in the space of the few days and try to build a functional app with the language. We faced many errors where we had to watch long videos to fix simple errors so it was a great challenge we came across. We also had the challenge of making API calls to external servers from inside the app as that was a major problem with our Please top me up feature.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Mostly we are proud of getting the app to work even with our limited knowledge of the languages used. We are also very proud of the work ethic we saw from all team members with everyone refusing to give up even though it seemed like we will never succeed.

What we learned

We learnt React language. But more importantly we learn a crucial problem solving skill which is even if you don’t fully understand how keep working until it works. We had a lot of challenges and staying motivated an d keeping up the work ethic even though sometimes it seemed as if we wouldn’t succeed really taught us the importance of not giving up.

What's next for Budgetlock and “Please top me up”

What is next for top me up and Budgetlock is to add more functionality to the features and get stores affiliated to make it more inclusive to even local stores and not just big stores. There’s also the potential of a great savings plan that can be developed for users around the concept of Budgetlock allowing users to get rewards from bring financially responsible and saving money for essentials.

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