MoneyBuddy

Inspiration

Speaking with PIMCO at the career fair made me want to give their financial challenge a shot, and having personally experienced significant financial hardship throughout college that required tedious budgeting and tracking of every receipt and payment, I wanted to make an app to cut out all the excel spreadsheets and tracking of receipts.

What it does

MoneyBuddy, Although just a Proof of Concept at this stage, will Perform a few main tasks for the user.

• Tracking of past history - To make this easier, I intend to allow the user to upload PDF Bank Statements or Credit Card Statements, then parse through each charge and categorize into preset types of expenses (ex: rent, grocery).

*Setting Goals - The user will be able to record what they want to save for and when they want to reach that goal - for example, saving for a car.

*Financial Literacy - This is a widget that will use a web scraper to retrieve the top article of the last 24 hours on financial habits - This will allow the user to effortlessly do passive reading on the subject and make it less intimidating to access good financial advice.

How we built it

I wrote this app alone in Swift, and using SwiftUI, SwiftCharts.

Challenges we ran into

My biggest challenge was learning Swift again - it has been 3 years since I last used this language, and have forgotten how many language specific details there are such as how data is accessed, or even syntax. Also, I am unfamiliar with Xcode and development on a Mac, so several hours went into reinstalling packages, updating Xcode, and even having to update my laptops software to support newer Xcode versions. And above all, due to these delays, I did not have time to work on what I was most excited about - the scanning receipts feature, and PDF Parsing algorithm that would have set the backbone to the project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I was able to get the chart working and the login screen working as intended, and especially the UI. I am happy with the color scheme and the overall layout of it all.

What we learned

For iOS development spend time to carefully learn how Xcode is structured and Mac development is compared to windows - so much time was lost to fixing something going wrong with Xcode, my Mac, or packages.

What's next for MoneyBuddy

I will continue to develop this app after this competition and eventually publish it. I am excited about this idea and I am still eagerly working on it, I have just unfortunately lost the time to get it to where I wanted it to be by the 24 hour mark. I will next add the scanning receipts feature, PDF parsing algorithm, web scraper, then refine the UI, then publish.

Built With

• siwft
• swiftcharts
• swiftui