ThriftIQ

Inspiration

A friend of ours was looking through his online bank statement one day and noticed that he was losing money more than he should. As university student, we have to live independently while managing our finances like budgets, expenses, tuitions fees and subscriptions for lifestyle conveniences like Netflix and Spotify. This sparked an idea between us to create something that could track what we spend and how we could save money, a common worry among all university students and even adults. With the advancement of AI, we could utilize this tool to help us make better decisions on what to spend and cut from.

What it does

The program will take in a .cvs file of a bank statement. The AI will then read all the transactions from the statement and categorize them into the type of expense (Groceries, Entertainment, Subscriptions, etc). After organizing all the transaction, the program creates a pie cart as a visual for the user to see what how much they spend in each category. The AI will also suggest possible ways to cut spending and save money on categories where you could save money on. This information is sent to the user by an html file.

How we built it

This program is coded in python, as it is the language all members are familiar with. It is also the easiest language to integrate Gen AI into our program. Using the assistance of copilot with some of the functions, we were able to develop a working program that uses OpenAI as the artificial intelligence running the program and some libraries to help collect data and format it for the user to see.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was trying to integrate the OpenAI API key into our program. We were researching ways to solve the issue, including resorting AI to add AI to our program. We ultimately paid for an API key from OpenAI, a choice we did not regret as that was integrating AI was the core part of our program, thus being able to progress to the program's completion.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As our first hackathon, we are proud of partaking an event like this and being able to produce our first code that uses AI.

What we learned

We learned how to integrate and use OpenAI into our python programming, utilizing AI for future projects

What's next for ThriftIQ

We hope that the concept of ThriftIQ could have real world implementation, whether that be in the form of an app, website, or feature in online banking