Budgeting Made Simple

As a first-generation, budgeting your money might be difficult. Budgeting Made Simple is designed so that it is done for you with preset or customizable budgeting plans tailored to you.

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Inspiration

When the prompt for the hackathon was put up, my partner and I had no clue what we were going to do. However, as we thought about it more, we realized that a budgeting app would be a great project idea. Looking at other budgeting apps, we gained some inspiration and took our own spin. We ended up deciding to create a budget app called, Budgeting Made Easy.

What it does

When you sign up and make an account, you are asked to input your income, whether you live in NY or NYC, and personal deductions. With this information, we utilized some Python code to calculate the estimated tax amount. After it's calculated, you can pick budgeting plans to further divide your money and finally you can choose how much money you want to go to specific categories such as rent and groceries.

How we built it

We decided to go with pure HTML, CSS, and JS for the front end and Flask for the back end. I created all the front-end designs through Figma while my partner did the back end with Flask. We used GitHub and Git to ensure our code matched up and worked.

Challenges we ran into

On several occasions, we ran into syntax errors due to a misspell or incorrect usage of syntax. Additionally, we ran into trouble when we were trying to get the app running due to a lack of knowledge of Flask.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The project. This was the first time my partner and I have ever worked in a group to code. We learned several new things during this hackathon. We can see how much we've grown since the beginning, especially in terms of knowledge of Git commands.

What we learned

We learned how to use Git commands in a team and how branches work. Prior to this experience, neither of us had ever run into a merge conflict or even created branches, but during this hackathon, we ran into a merge error. Nevertheless, we learned from that experience and now we have gained experience with merge conflicts.

What's next for Budgeting App

We want to make the app more responsive as most of the CSS is not very responsive to different screen sizes. Additionally, we want to add more locations for the tax calculations as it can only calculate the taxes for people in NY and NYC add a badge system as it's half-implemented.

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