Inspiration
Many people in the world are living check to check, some even with families and children to take care of. This ubiquitous issue of individuals not being able to put their children or themselves through a decent education, not being able to eat a nutritious meal, not being able to afford healthcare, and other similar problems really worried us about where society is headed. We weren't only worried about these worldwide problems, however. Many people struggle with saving money and we wanted to come up with a way to facilitate the process.
What it does
Some of them think that there is nothing that they can do in order to end the continuous cycle of living check to check, but there is a solution! BudgetBank aggregates all of the bank accounts and credit card accounts that an individual has and provides the user with important information that helps them easily view their spending habits. By using this app, the user can enter in a goal of how much money he or she wants to save each month. Having a physical amount that an individual want to save lets him or her make smart decisions about what should or should not be bought. Many people lose track of what was bought during each month, but by having BudgetBank automatically track financial information makes the process of tracking money so much easier, which of course, this results in saving money without lifting a finger..
How I built it
We used Swift to build the front-end design of the iOS application. Using the Plaid API allowed us to aggregate a bunch of financial information to ultimately build the easiest budgeting app there is. To make the user's spending habits easily viewable, we used an external iOS-charts library developed by Daniel Cohen Gindi. This library provides an extremely aesthetically pleasing interface to help users make smart decisions as to what to buy or what not to buy. We also used Microsoft Azure to create a SQL database to hold the data that Plaid provided for us. By using this powerful tool, we are able to easily pull information and give real time data.
Challenges I ran into
A challenge that we ran into was trying to integrate the SQL server with iOS. Because this was our first times creating a database between Microsoft and iOS, we learned about Xamarin a little too late to be able to implement it. We had problems trying to use code (instead of simply viewing it through Microsoft SQL Server) to read the data from the SQL database. Another challenge that we ran into was parsing the data obtained by the Plaid API, specifically the multi-factor authentication. Because each bank has a unique authentication model, parsing the data was quite challenging. Creating models for aesthetic visualization was also quite difficult with iOS.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
An accomplishment that we are proud of is actually creating a product that can help people save money so that they can end up using it for something important. Another accomplishment that we are proud of is successfully using many different types of technologies to make an app that can help others with common issues. We have never used these specific technologies and APIs together and felt we did a good job implementing everything.
What I learned
We learned a lot about the different technologies that we used. We also learned a lot about databases and how to create and integrate one into an iOS application. We picked up the skill of thinking creatively as well.
What's next for BudgetBank
We hope BudgetBank will be used throughout the world, in hopes of helping people budget their money wisely. We only used the dummy data provided by the companies at the hackathon and would like BudgetBank to start working with actual companies to provide real information to its users.
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