Inspiration
Many accountability applications struggle with user-retention -- there's not enough reward to keep users engaged long enough to develop the habit of using the app. Enfauxlope aims to fix this by "gameifying" certain aspects of the application. By calculating and showing various metrics such as Experience and Savings Goals as they update, users will want to keep returning to the app so they can see their stats increase in real-time.
What it does
Enfauxlope helps people hold themselves accountable for their personal finances. By calling the Stripe API related to specific virtual cards, we can track transactions, categorize them, and track spending per category. Users are able to self-assign budgets for different categories, and will earn increases to their Kudos stats by staying under-budget or making transactions in specific self-betterment categories.
How we built it
We built a database using PostgreSQL and queried the database using the Stripe API. Our Frontend built with Node and React allows users to make queries to the Postgres database, and displays the data gathered with the Stripe API.
Challenges we ran into
We originally planned to use the Plaid API to track transactions, but the documentation and implementation of the API was poor, so we transitioned to using the Stripe API instead.
The downside of the Stripe API is that it cannot link with a real bank account, the transactions must be done via Stripe virtual cards. We believed the pros of the Stripe API far outweighed the API limitations.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Making the app work with potential real world data. Our system is populated with test data hosted by Stripe, but it would function identically if a real user connected to our system with their personal Virtual Card.
We were able to pare down the Stripe API to display the information we felt was relevant for the scope of our project, but it is easily scalable -- able to create even more categories and display significant more data about each transaction than is currently being utilized.
What we learned
A few of our members had little to no experience connected Frontends with Backends/APIs. This project was a great learning experience, giving members the opportunity to dip their toes into Full-Stack engineering.
More specifically, we learned a lot about JavaScript and how the language is formatted through React, and we learned a lot about how other platforms manipulate banking transactions and transaction APIs.
What's next for Enfauxlope
We plan to expand it to allow user-defined transaction categories. Also, integrating plaid as well as stripe would allow the app to work with any bank account, no longer being restricted to just virtual Stripe cards. This was our original implementation idea, but it was beyond our scope.
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