Inspiration
We are most likely in an incredible amount of debt, yet we all have no clue about our financials and we thought this problem was common around the world and needs a solution.
What it does
Financial A(I)dvisor is a website that the user inputs financial details and in return it emails them an analysis of their spending and gives investment advice.
How we built it
The form was built using HTML which then uses PHP and an Apache server to send the user's data to a python script to perform the financial analysis as well as to update the mySQL database.
Challenges we ran into
For some reason, PHP did not want to run python with a passion. We were using this to try and pass our variables and run our script,
''' $result = shell_exec('C:\Users\graha\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps\python3.9.exe C:\wamp64\www\FINANCE\main.py '); '''
After much testing we had no clue what was wrong since we could run any other file type with shell_exec() and also command prompt was fine the files and directories.
This issue took a lot of time and we ended up installing flask which allowed us to send the data to the file.
Moral of the story, don't use php.
What we learned
We learned a lot from this project, mainly because most of us went into it with a small amount of knowledge on working with PHP files to python and analyzing data with them. The issue mentioned above had us learning a lot about how python and PHP can work together and different ways to connect them, which in the end resulted in installing Flask (after much pain and research that didn't help our situation). This project also involved us looking into financial investments and which ones are good for which situations and how much risk is involved with each, although we did not have time to implement the investment advice properly nor incorporate it into our database or machine learning. Finally, our work with numpy helped us learn more about how useful it is and how to integrate it into financial reports.
What's next for Finance A(I)dvisor
The plan for Finance A(I)dvisor is to partner with financial advisors. This platform would be a fantastic way for advisors to get into contact with people in need of financial advice. In addition, this would give the financial advisors an easy way to see all the client's spendings and take advice from the AI. In return, we would have the financial advisors give their own recommendations which would provide validation and in terms of improving the machine learning algorithm until theoretically, one day it can make recommendations better than any human. Furthermore, we plan on connecting our program to Power BI or another data visualization tool, giving the user an easy-to-understand report of their finances and how to improve. Finally, we want our machine learning to give the user investment advice depending on their financial situation, level of risk that they're comfortable with, and the investments taken by others that Financial A(I)dvisor has helped, which would be included in our database.
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