Inspiration Living off campus with your close friends is a fun and rewarding experience. With new responsibilities it can be hard to keep track of the little things. Every week you are buying groceries, toiletries, dinner and many other important communal necessities. Its hard to keep track of who owes who and what your roommates already paid you for. Its also annoying to see your bank statements riddled with instant transactions. Our app plans on simplifying this process.
What it does In essence our app keeps track of debts between small groups of friends. By inputting what you paid for and how much, the app will automatically calculate who owes debt and who has paid it off. With the option of paying off any existing debt at a later point in time, your bank statements wont be riddled with many small transactions. Splitting groceries couldn’t be easier. If you have a large debt to your friend and end up paying for his dinner, the app will automatically recalculate the amount you owe them. Eventually balancing out debts, the app hopes to mitigate the number of times you pay your close friends back and forth, helping to keep tabs, so you don’t have too.
How we built it Using android-studio we created the frame work you will see on your phone. Numerous back end classes control the personal data and group debt data. This was integrated into the user-friendly GUI that is simple and effective. Firebase was utilized for a registration and log in to the app. It was also used for the database to hold the group data that connects the users.
Challenges we ran into The first major obstacle we ran into was creating the data set and algorithm to store and go through groups. It was tough to come up with a systematic and efficient way to update and recalculate debts between different people in a group.
Another major obstacle came with implementing Firebase into your app. Connected the authentication to our working prototype was a tedious and timely process but with persistence we were able to make it happen. Using the database part of Firebase might be the biggest challenge so far. Trying to store multiple users’ information in the cloud is a difficult process in itself, let alone trying to use the data.
Accomplishments that we're proud of Completing the algorithm and having an awesome looking login page and user interface is extremely exciting for us. We are all first-time hackers at Bitcamp, so seeing a semi-finished product is a cool experience.
What we learned Integrating between backend and front end coding has been a fun and rewarding experience for all of us. We learned how to problem solve, write and test code effectively and brainstorm a fun idea.
What's next for Tabs Partnering with CapitalOne to make our app a reality! Connect real bank accounts and make it legit.
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