Raccoon Pay 2

Inspiration

There has been many times when we eat outside with friends and someone pays the bill, we need to calculate how much each person needs to pay that person later. It's even more difficult to calculate when different people consume items with different prices (splitting tax and tip could be a headache).

What it does

By entering items everyone consumed during an event as well as who consumed each item, the app calculates how much each person needs to pay and sends a text message to each person including the total amount this person needs to pay as well as details of items.

How I built it

For the frontend we used Vue.js together with Vue Router which makes it easy to impelment a single page app that has multiple views. For the backend we used LeanCloud which offers structured data storage, web hosting, and SMS services.

Challenges I ran into

We're unsure if the app made it convenient enough for users to enter items on a bill. We considered using OCR to allow users to upload a photo of receipt to automatically generate data in our system, but since we're not familiar with such technology, we didn't implement that in the end.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

It's the first time we implement signing in with phone number and verification code. We found it a surprisingly good match for this app to adopt this authentication method.

What I learned

We got a better understanding about how we could design data schema to make the app fast and easy to maintain.

What's next for Raccoon Pay 2

Perhaps a better integration with existing payment systems (like PayPal and Venmo) so that users can not only send text message requests to split a bill with others but also easily collect and send money.

Built With

• leancloud
• node.js
• vue.js