Inspiration
SplitPay was inspired by personal outings with larger friend groups where a large bill can be a pain. If the group doesn't split the bill, then there's the worry of asking people to pay you back and occasionally people forgetting to pay you back for covering the bill. However, if the group does split the bill, the waiter/waitress has to waste several minutes splitting the check and processing all the different methods of payment. With this problem in mind, SplitPay was created.
What it does
With SplitPay, you can quickly and easily scan a receipt, drag and drop different friend profiles to their respective specific food orders contained on the scanned receipt, and instantaneously send Venmo requests accordingly with just one click.
How we built it
We used Google ML text recognition kit for the reading of the receipt contents. We then had to parse the strings that we got from the text recognition so that we would only receive food item names, quantity, and price of each item. We were then able to take this data and utilize Flask to retrieve this data via the server side. With this data (item name and price) we were able to have this show up on the mobile application for different member selections.
Challenges we ran into
Our first challenge with SplitPay was implementing text recognition for images of a receipt, parsing this text, and matching food items with prices. This was especially challenging because not all receipts are of similar format, spacing, etc. Another challenge that we encountered was utilizing Flask to connect our front-end to our back-end. It was difficult for us to organize and send our data to the server side. Possibly, the biggest challenge, however, was learning flutter from scratch and using it to implement our idea.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that we were able to delve into mobile development for the first time and learn something new. Although going the more familiar route of web development was enticing, we abstained from doing so and therefore learned a lot. We are also proud of the fact that we were able to put so much focus into the project and not sleep or waste too much of our time.
What we learned
In general, we learned mobile development, Flask, and text recognition, but through all our struggles we learned how to work better as a team. Not knowing how to code something or what was wrong with our code was the beauty of it all because we were able to figure it out together as a team and learn so much.
What's next for SplitPay
We hope to innovate different aspects of the process, for example, make a more secure method of venmo login since venmo does have access to bank information and transactions. Additionally, we hope to improve the aesthetic appeal of the application since we were very much flutter beginners throughout development.
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