Common Cents

Login Page for app
Main page for app
Registration page for app

Inspiration

Did you know that an estimated 57% of Americans today could not afford an extra $400 surprise expense. This sort of financial instability has a massive effect on the mental wellbeing of our citizenry. In recent time, this problem has only been exacerbated by the Covid-19 crisis. Having a rainy day fund can have an overwhelming impact on the day-to-day lives of everyone.

What it does

This app aims to encourage and facilitate the easy creation of an emergency fund by "rounding up" everyday purchases, slowly but surely, contributing to your financial wellbeing. For example, if you went to the convenience store and purchased a candy bar for $3.72 then our app would create a transfer request from your account to your savings account for the difference, netting your savings account $.28. This may not seem like a lot but they really add up!

How we built it

We used the Nessie api, which can simulate the creation of bank accounts, bank clients, purchases on those accounts, and transfers between accounts. This allows us to simulate the position of a bank offering the service of rounding up certain checking accounts expenses and automatically transferring the correct amount to the rainy day savings account.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we ran into was the creation of our own test data, as well as exploring the capabilities of the API and understanding how to to use it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The app actually works, it takes in a client, goes through their accounts and automatically detects (and remembers) the purchases that need to be rounded up and their differences transferred to the savings account.

What we learned

We had never used SQL before but we needed it for persistent and fast storage to better keep track of purchases and transfers made by the app.

What's next for Common Cents

Due to the nature of a hackathon, many quality of life features are cut to prove the concept. We would like to develop these sorts of features: saving login credentials, registering new credentials, modifying which checking accounts are considered for transferring from, more details on transfers and shown overall.