Pyrite - Making financial management fun!

💭 Inspiration

Our inspiration comes from our friends' complaints regarding painstakingly managing their data in a spreadsheet in order to keep track of their money and transactions. We realize that a lot of young adults our age are not engaged and proactive in terms of financing, because it appears intimidating, mundane, and is generally not taught systematically. Because of this, we have decided to make a website that simplifies this process, aiming to encouarge and educate young people like ourselves to better manage their finances.

🔧 What it does

Pyrite takes bank statements, processes them, sorts them, and produces insightful information based on the transactions provided; these insights features highlighting notable trends and references to financial stability. Our algorithm achieves this by sorting transactions into categories, calculates their relative significance, and then generates a user friendly visualization. These data are simplified in representation compared to their original form, but does not lose technical accuracy, to improve user comprehension of the data.

💻 How we built it

Figma for brainstorm and design process
Python as backend
Flask as web framework (as recommended by the organizers)
Git as project management
Pandas as data analysis
ChartJS as graphical display

🏋️ Challenges we ran into

We encountered design issues and technical issues during the building process. It was difficult to pinpoint a specific idea that could generate a project roadmap. Our original ideas were either too complicated, too broad, or don't tie in well with the theme. Even after coming into agreement with the vision of our project, it later still occurred that some of our group members had different interpretations of our goals, which hindered our progress. Adapting and learning Flask, Panda, and ChartJS were a challenge as well, as they are new to all of us; however, by overcoming these problems, we gained very valuable experiences.

🎉 Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to produce a product that we are all satisfied with for the constraints (such as time) we had to work with. We managed to bond as a team and conquer issues together with our best efforts.

🤔 What we learned

We had a few learning bumps along the way such as translating data, learning flask, and making sure we don't break each other's code on Github. Our team learned the importance of collaboration, especially during ideation and design. We made sure to include the developers during the design meetings, and including the designers in technical communicates, because of the value and insight they can bring. Overall our team is proud of the product we were able to create and see the functionality come to life.

💎 What's next for Pyrite

What to expect next from Pyrite is a better approach to personalized data and more features that offer financial support that would benefit young adults. We also want to focus on how we can help high school graduates navigate and manage their finances. Either by being a bridge to existing resources or being the gateway to taking charge of their finances.

We hope we were able to inspire some of you to review your bank statements and make better spending decisions 🙂

Thank you! 💙 Pyrite team