Inspiration
In today's world, managing money can be quite difficult. We wanted to build a practical fintech solution that would help students and professionals make better day-to-day financial decisions. A lot of budgeting tools are either too manual, too automatic, or are filled with too much jargon. We wanted to build a lightweight product that makes it easier to understand spending, track progress toward goals, and build healthier money habits.
What it does
This project focuses on allowing users to monitor and manage their personal finances in a simple, guided way. We primarily focus on turning daily transactions into insights such as spending summaries, budget status, and goal progress, so users can quickly understand where their money is going.
How I built it
We built this project primarily using React and JavaScript. The app is structured as a front-end application and reuses UI components from the React Native framework. We organized the code to keep UI, navigation, and logic separated so we could iterate quickly during the hackathon while still keeping the codebase maintainable for future iteration.
Challenges I ran into
Designing a clean user experience that stayed simple and allowed anybody without financial knowledge to understand exactly what was going on was one of the big challenges we faced while creating this project. It was also our first mobile application, so getting used to the formatting and screen sizes was another challenge.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
This was my first proper entry point into the hackathon space and also into backend work. I wrote my first backend within the same monorepo, which I'm quite proud of, considering that I did not have any prior experience.
What I learned
It is extremely valuable to define what the words "minimal" and "dumb" mean. We can iterate continuously and explore extreme combinations of different things; however, limited time forces us to cut our scope down to the very essentials.
What's next for Spartahack 9 - FinTech Project
For now, this project has been parked. However, if we were to pick it up again in the future, we would want to add UI/UX polish, an onboarding flow, clearer summaries, and better visuals. We would also be more robust in data persistence, add support for an external database, add analytics to track user interactions, and leverage real APIs to interact with user financial data.
