Budgy

Inspiration

Our team members are all college students who need their expenses managed. As our money is very limited, like many college students, we do not go into debt or a financial crisis where we will be unable to resolve the problem quickly. Becoming more financially stable is a goal we wish to attain and often struggle with staying organized. Many times professional services/apps are available, but they can be very intimidating for students as it feels costly or some association of cost that will eventually be attached. We believe other college students like ourselves may also be facing the same problem, so we wanted to make a user-friendly interface to help students stay on track for future finances, which will help alleviate students from many mental and social health problems. So, we created Budgy!

What it does

Our application is geared toward college/university students who are financially struggling, and a majority of college students, cannot afford a financial advisor. As college students can be very busy, they are unable to spend time researching how to properly manage their finances and keep track. Some students keep track of their spending on Excel sheets, but they can get lost as visualizations are not provided unless manual work is done. Budgy allows students to enter their daily spending, requesting input of the student's budget, actual spending, and the category of spending which then calculates if the student met the daily budget and shows whether the student met their daily budget or not. The app visualizes this and also has other features to help them with their daily budgets. Excel sheets can be very time-consuming. The application also has articles and stories through the nav bar to help students be better educated in managing their finances. The articles vary from news, academic focus, story, and others. There is also a buddy system option in the application if students want to enforce accountability for themselves where their "buddy" gives them feedback or reminders of how their spending is going.

How we built it

We build the application using rails following the MVC structure. We created low-fidelity mockups using Samsung Notes and created high-fidelity mockups using Figma Our presentation was created using Microsoft PowerPoint.

Challenges we ran into

Due to time constraints, we were unable to implement all of the features we wanted to. We faced challenges in balancing the user interface and the backend. Our second developer was unable to attend Technica 2022, leading to imbalanced work distribution.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team is proud to have a working backend and an admirable prototype that aligns with our vision of the completed application. We were able to get all of the features recorded in detail in the prototype, and have logical relationships set up in our databases.

What we learned

We learned great teamwork and collaboration, and how to bring together our final project through development, mockups, brainstorming ideas and sketches, and market research. We learned that there are many apps out there to help people manage their finances, however, some of them tried to have their users actually spend more by getting involved in stocks, and did not have articles or tips to educate the students - rather just facts/information only, and no buddy system to enforce accountability of spendings.