Recurring Venmo Request Scheduler

Team Members

Mike Luvin, Patrick Pynadath, Aryan Jain, Ishaan Narain

Why we made this

Venmo is a wonderful app - it removes the headache of splitting bills, and makes it easier to organize events - it really is no surprise that college students adore Venmo.

But because everyone loves Venmo such much, it's become so much more convenient to use Venmo for recurring charges we split with our friends--such as Netflix subscriptions and rent. 65% of college students room with at least one other student -- this means that a good portion of our entire living expense goes into recurring shared expenses. Even beyond the college campus, 100 million adults share a household with another adult.

Instead of scheduling a recurring reminder in google calendar or just praying that it doesn't slip through the cracks, wouldn't it be nice if we could just schedule the Venmo request? Instead of having to come up with a vaguely creative Venmo note about the same charge every week, what if you could just schedule a request or payment to whoever? And what if all you needed to do was just log in with the same exact Venmo login and password?

This problem is soemthing we all decided was something we want to nip in the bud once and for all, and we created this Life Hack to make recurring venmo charges easier to manage! All you do to use our feature is run the app, log in with Venmo, and manage all your scheduled payments. No need to return to the app -- Venmo or ours -- if you don't need to.

Inspiration

We decided to create this Life Hack to make recurring venmo charges easier to manage! Have you ever agreed to share a monthly subscription but often forgot to charge for it every month, or forgot to ask for rent in time and had to pay a late fee? This venmo scheduler will allow you to create and manage your venmo recurring charges with ease! This project was ideated

What it does

The Venmo payments and requests scheduler allows users to automate recurring payments and requests, with text notification reminders when payments or requests are sent.

Through our web app, log in, search for, and select a friend you want to send or requests a payment from, an amount, start date, end date, and a Venmo note saying what its for. Our Web App will then take care of the rest. Further, if you no longer want this recurring charge to go through, you can simply edit, delete the charge.

How we built it

Our functioning prototypes leverages several technologies end-to-end to deliver the users an effortless experience to create and manage their recurring Venmo charges; This includes:

React.JS and MaterialUI to create the user-facing UI
PostgreSQL for the backend database to store access tokens, user information, and details about recurring Venmo charges
Twilio to alert users via text notifications on the status of our text notifications.
Created Two-Factor Authentication for security purposes to ensure charges are not comprimised
Rewrote several classes of the Venmo API to allow for faster Venmo interactions
Created API endpoints for our web app through Flask to fastrack the creation and server processes

Challenges we ran into

Some of the challenges we faced include:

Manually overriding class methods from the current Venmo API library to support our webapp for login and MFA
Including functionality for 2-factor OTP authentication
Developing a Postgres database for storing and retrieving user date for payments
Integrating and debugging backend functionality with front end through end-points

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Developing an interactive front-end user experience through the web app
Ability to store user information through a relational database
Effectively leveraging Github to divide and conquer different tasks in the begining and at the end for integration
Modifying the existing venmo-api library to fit our needs
Can search friends by username or name

What we learned

Planning and allocating of various tasks across all team members for completion of project in time
Process of integrating front end and back end functional
Working with different technologies including multi-factor authentication and relational databases