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Inspiration
When it comes time to face the bill, it can be difficult to split it between friends. Whether it may be paying someone's fair share of rent, the split of groceries, or simply just going out to eat with friends, it's hard to keep track of what their share was, what they paid for, or even if they paid in the first place!
What it does
It can be cumbersome to keep track of debt. College students need a streamlined method to keep track of bills. Halfsies provides a streamlined solution to splitting payment by allowing users to add people to groups and post the bill along with additional documentation, including tips, sales tax, fees, etc. Likewise, you can add multiple bills to this group. Say you have a group of roommates, some bills could be groceries, rent, you get the idea. In addition you can keep track of who has paid and who hasn't, so it isn't up to you to remember who paid and who hasn't.
How we built it
We utilized the Flutter SDK to create our app. Firebase was used as the database, and Android-studio and XCode were used to develop a platform that both android and iOS compatible, respectively.
Challenges we ran into
We wanted to implement the Capital One API to access bank accounts, but we were having issues regarding the interactions with our app. Along with time constraints, we unfortunately weren't able to implement their API. Also coming up with an efficient data storage structure for the backend took a bit of thinking.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This was our first time building an app together, so connecting the front end and back end was challenging. It was nice to see two parts of our project come together into, after many hours of debugging, a functionable app. At first a lot of us were butting heads regarding the direction of the app, but the process allowed us to generate different ways to implement features into our app. In the end we learned how to more efficiently brainstorm and became closer as friends!
What I learned
Patience is a virtue. As a group of people who have all coded before, we're aware of the trials in coding: errors and errors everywhere. But even in a scenario with a time limit, it's important to take a step back and process what you've done, and to take a breather and slow down instead of trying to do everything at once. We also all learned a lot about Flutter app development and the Dart language.
What's next for Halfsies
We are considering a global launch for our app because it not only seems profitable, but it would also be very useful in our day to day lives!
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