Centsible

Going Dutch? With Centsible, splitting bills has never been easier. Just snap, add, and pay. Wherever you are, Centsible is your simple, secure, and sustainable solution to divy your receipts.

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Our Inspiration

Whenever we go out to grab a bite or grocery shop together, we often find ourselves in a hassle, figuring out how to split the bill. Between figuring out what everyone got, tipping the service, and calculating tax, we often found it annoying to split the bill. On top of that, you have to get on everyones back and keep track of who has or has not paid you yet.

What Centsible does

Centsible is your sensible solution to splitting the bill. Rather than scrolling through your Venmo transaction histories, all the information can be stored in Centsible. It's as simple as Scan, Add, and Pay! Scan your receipt, add you friends, and pay the owner!

How Centsible is built

We built it using Javascript, Firebase, HTML, CSS and Bootstrap. Our Frontend developers focused on creating a website that looks user friendly that can be hosted by firebase. Our Backend developers focused on creating JS methods that could properly access the read and write our database. At the finale, both teams worked together to integrate their works into one, seamless project.

Our Challenges

At first, we struggled with finding a place to host a non-static website. We turned to Google Cloud at first but had problems with that. We eventually shifted to MongoDB, which worked well at first. As we moved on, we found it difficult and switched to Firebase instead, which offers hosting, something we couldn't figure out how to do with MongoDB and express.js. We also worked on using tesseract.js for a receipt scanning function; however, we had difficulty finding an AI that we could use to parse the text that was returned by the script.

What we are proud of

Throughout this project, we have grown significantly in our coding knowledge. We learned so much about using databases and creating a non-static website as it was the first time for most of us. Three out of our four members are very new to coding and the Hackathon experience, so we gained a lot of experience within these 24 hours. We learned how to take an idea, and launch it into a functioning website.

Learning Takeaways

We learned how to use databases to create a non-static website! We also learned how to use Firestore to host and create accounts through the Google Auth Services. Our backend developers had never used with databases and they successfully learned how to connect our project to an online database to store information.

What's next for Centsible

While Centsible is relatively simplistic right now, we have dreams of expanding its functionalities in may ways. Some of our ideas include:

  • Adding a secure payment option through Centsible itself
  • Creating a mobile app to make Snap & Scan easier
  • Researching and implementing AI to help us parse strings returned from tesseract OCR scanner.
  • Display individual items purchased on each receipt
  • Make Centsible more fun (and wallet-friendly)! Adding Centsible Reward points for users who use our app would help encourage the usage of our app.
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