Inspiration

What it does

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

What's next for Pocket Friend

Inspiration

Students often have limited budgets but find it difficult to track everyday spending and build consistent saving habits. We wanted to make money management simpler, more approachable, and less intimidating.

What it does

Pocket Friend is a student-focused budgeting app built with Python and Streamlit. Users can set a budget, record expenses, view their expense history, and ask a conversational assistant for basic spending and savings guidance.

The assistant supports simple natural-language commands, such as recording a lunch expense, checking remaining budget, and evaluating a planned purchase against the entered budget.

How we built it

We built the prototype using Python, Streamlit, and SQLite, with Pandas for displaying and summarizing expense data. The app runs locally and stores expense records in a database.

Challenges and learnings

One challenge was connecting the chat interface to the expense-tracking functions so that user messages could trigger useful actions. We learned how to build a simple interactive web app, store records in a database, and generate budget guidance from recorded spending.

What's next

We plan to improve natural-language understanding, add accurate monthly expense filtering, enhance the interface, and explore voice interaction and AI integration.

Pocket Friend is an early prototype, and its current assistant uses rule-based logic rather than a live generative AI model.