Fin Buddy

Inspiration

Difficulty managing our finances as college students :.(

What it does

Helps you track your finances. It also features a built in calculator similar to Desmos. The budget tracker takes in your monthly income and helps you split your money between different categories of expenses like entertainment, etc. You can see a progress bar that shows how much money you've spent, and the app also shows how much money you have left.

How we built it

The logic behind the app had been coded directly by us, but the UI had been built with help from ChatGPT. There are UI apps built without help, but we chose to go with the one by ChatGPT because it is more aesthetically pleasing. The original UI works but isn't pretty, and it still exists in the repo.

Challenges we ran into

ChatGPT is terrible at coding. The UI was pretty but the categories got reset every single time because it hadn't been integrated properly with the logic. So, I had to learn everything it did to figure out how to save and retrieve data. Essentially, I saved the data into a binary file with much difficulty, and made it so that the setup page only shows up if the data file doesn't exist. Then, I had to retrieve the data from the file and display it on the Dashboard Page.