Spectrum

Inspiration

Our project was inspired by the idea of creating a community approach to help individuals reduce their financial expenses. We recognized that many people struggle with managing their finances and often feel alone in their struggles. By creating a platform that allows users to connect with others who have similar financial goals and lifestyles, we hoped to empower people to take control of their finances and make informed decisions about their spending.

What it does

Our goal is to create a supportive and informative community that empowers individuals to make smart financial choices and achieve their financial goals. The use of the donut chart and ability to compare expenses with others anonymously with similar lifestyle is a key component of our project. This is done in 3 steps:

Analyze spending patterns and compare to industry benchmarks to identify areas of excessive spending.
Use comparison data to negotiate better deals with vendors and suppliers, as well as cut down on areas of high spending.
Cater to a broader audience by providing anonymity and an incentive to share with others.

How we built it

As a team, we decided to use the MERN stack to complete our project, taking in consideration that there is a lot of documentation that we had access to if required. Additionally, we took in account the our application would have a lot of read writes and MongoDB was the perfect solution to this, since it stores data in a single document for an entity.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into the challenge of setting up asynchronous calls to work with Redux, which is a library used to manage the application state. Since it requires deep understanding of Redux, setting it up for the first time presented as a huge challenge. Another challenge we encountered was applying the proper stylings using Material-UI, a React Designing framework. Finally, creating custom components with desired styling to display fetched data was challenging since we were not to familiar with libraries for data visualization.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

24 hours in and our web app is already boasting impressive data visualization capabilities. We're proud to have quickly implemented donut and graph charts as well. Finally setting up the entire axios API to fetch data and update our Redux global store is not perfect, but a major accomplishment.

What we learned

It required a lot of determination, but were able to learn the basics and dive into the more complex parts of the MERN stack in record time. We were able to do this with a combination of online tutorials and documentation.

What's next for Spectrum

Our goal is to optimize the backend of our web app to provide faster and more efficient data retrieval for our users. We also aim to expand and improve the expense optimization feature, as well as enhance the overall styling by leveraging the full capabilities of Material UI.