PayUp

Inspiration

Frustrated at the manual data entry requirements of most currently existing money management apps, we decided to develop an application that allows for quick and easy updating of data to keep track of the money flow between multiple users.

What it does

Simply by taking a picture of a receipt from any transaction, data about the transaction can be stored and dynamically updated. This is ultimately used to keep track of how much money users owe each other.

How we built it

The front end is a mobile application (Android) that allows the user to take pictures of receipts. Data is then sent to the back end via HTTP. The back end is written in Java and uses a Tomcat servlet hosted on AWS to update the user's information (by extracting data from the image using the Google Cloud Vision API) and serve data to be displayed on the front end.

Challenges we ran into

Poor workflow design. We quickly realized that any back end implementations would not be accessible to the end user until the front end team completed the interface for the feature. This bottleneck prevented us from optimizing our time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In the end we produced a clean functional application which properly implemented the concept we had envisioned.

What we learned

Proper organization and delegation of subtasks is more important than may initially seem. In our case, it resulted in significant amounts of time not being efficiently utilized and therefore being forced to scale back our range of features in order to meet the time deadline.

What's next for payup

In the future more features could be implemented so that our tool not only provides the user with easier data entry, but also provides more functionality so that it can compete with other similar applications currently on the market.