Money Mentor

Invest in Your Future with Money Mentor. We provide a fun, interactive saving experience that, by equipping students with crucial financial literacy, will lay foundations for a stable future.

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Inspiration

We noticed that many students aren't financially literate when they come to university, and many of these people still aren't when they reach mid-life. Many struggle with budgeting, understanding the impact of spending habits, and preparing for future financial health. We wanted to create an interactive tool that not only tracks spending but also teaches financial literacy in a gamified, engaging way.

What it does

Money Mentor is an application that helps students track their spending habits, provide personal insights to help them save and budget, and learn about financial literacy in an interactive way. It provides a function where users can scan a receipt using their mobile phone camera and the app analyses and produces insights and data on the information from the receipt.

How we built it

We used HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the front-end, tesseract OCR and OpenCV for image processing and flask in the back-end. We used LLMs to analyse the receipt text and provide relevant financial insights.

Challenges we ran into

It was a struggle to maintain the front-end display, as their was a LOT of CSS and HTML code used. Also connecting the front-end and back-end was a significant challenge as the text data output by the server after processing wasn't being accepted by the client.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully processing and extracting all relevant text data from a receipt. Working and competing in a team for 25 hours and learning how to deal with merge conflicts. Completing our first ever Hackathon!!

What we learned

We learned a lot about OCR image processing, as well as user interface implementation and formatting, front-end to back-end compatibility, and data processing and graphical output. We learned that joining back-end and front-end can be really challenging when using separate client and server sides. Learning how to use Git was another big learning curve for us in this project, We also learned to work as a team and work to each other's strengths. Shoutout to Sam and Fin who stayed programming in Junction for the whole 25 hours!!

What's next for Money Mentor

We plan to refine the OCR functionality to better recognise a broader range of receipt and online transaction formats and add more detailed spending recommendations. We also want to expand the educational features by adding teaching modules on savings, investments, and debt management to give students a helpful tool to prepare for a financially secure future.

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