gaBANKxa

Inspiration

Money comes in, money goes out... but do we really know where it's going?
When we saw PNC’s challenge, as PNC customers we decided to visit our mobile banking apps and think about our own financial habits. We realized that between the two of us we had lost hundreds of dollars to unwanted subscriptions and overspending on things we didn't need, and we aren't alone. Many people (especially young adults) don’t keep up with their spending, leading to overspending, unwanted subscriptions, or even fraudulent charges slipping through the cracks. Features that provide simple-to-understand spending insights and subscription tracking wouldve made huge difference in helping us stay financially aware. We wanted to create something that helps people take control of their money in a simple way.

gaBANKxa (gaby + BANK + alexa) is a smart banking app that provides spending snsights to track trends and subscription protection to flag and manage recurring charges.
If subscriptions are unauthorized, you can refute it with just a tap.
You can see the percent you have spent on certain categories (grocery, dining, entertainment, bills, etc.) per month and for all time, in order to compare and adjust your budget.

We used React+Vite to host our website locally and create a starter HTML file with some incomplete CSS code, then created a skeleton of what our web app was going to look like by adding three tabs.
From there we split off. We both worked on pages individually trying to figure out how to create charts and aligning text. We had hourly checkins to make sure that neither of us were facing any huge difficulties and worked together from beginning to end.
We created and imported a JSON file to serve as our user information into our project, extracting and analyzing the relevant data to create our spending insights and subscription recognition.

Our first big hurdle was downloading react onto our computers. We both had so many conflicting dependencies and things that were out of date or too new to be compatible. Step 0 took us over an hour to complete
The next big issue we faced was when we did our first merge on GitHub, we noticed (after a bit of wasted time) that some changes weren't worth the hassle of merging so we had restart a couple things to make them compatible with the others code
Finally, finding the best way to import a users data, without just hardcoding finances into our code. We wanted to make our web app as adaptable as possible, however adaptiveness came at a cost
(We had other difficulties but these were the main three)

Before this weekend neither of us had any prior website experience. With every button, chart, and color that appeared we both would get excited and celebrate our small victories. We are both very proud of what we accomplished and could have never imagined that our end product would look like this 36 hours later.