Inspiration
As someone who minors in Management, the financial reports can be very powerful and insightful, however not everyone understand how to use it. Hence, we would like to have something to aid us, regardless if we are individuals or company internals, to analyze the financial reports and leave all the finding-something-in-a-mess trouble to the website.
What it does
The website accepts a company name input, which will then return a table of financial items and their values.
How we built it
Our main language is Python. We uses Django on the backend, with some HTML and CSS for minimal frontend support and UI interface. We then heavily rely on sec-api to retrieve financial reports from their database. We then wrote our own code to extract data from the report and display it back. We then host in on Heroku.
Challenges we ran into
Not everyone on the team knows Python, so there was a steep learning curve for some members to understand how to write Python code as well as how to use its libraries and frameworks. The other challenge is extracting information from the financial report. Each report is a little different, hence not all companies will have the exact same financial fields. We try to extract the main ones which took us a lot of time to structure it. The other challenge is hosting. None of us on the team has experience hosting a Django based website, hence it took a lot of time figuring out how to do it and solving errors we are getting when deploying our website.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that we actually can read in user input and then displaying the correct values to the users. It was our first time connecting the frontend with a third-party api, and we are pretty excited. We are also really excited when we are able to deploy our website to Heroku. That took a really long time, so we were really proud of it when it actually worked. We got someone across the globe to help test it and it was persisting data for him, so that's really cool.
What we learned
We learned how to create a simple full stack website (without a database, though) using Python frameworks and also how to host it. I think the other main takeaway is that we should never give up when we having troubles with our code because it can be solved and it is extremely rewarding when we get it to work.
What's next for Easy Finance
We will allow users to input more than one company in order to compare between companies. We will use exisiting data to calculate more financial related items that are equally just important to provide more insights. We will also probably try to extract charts and data from other websites about the current financial trends in a specific industries so users can compare a company to the general trend.
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