Inspiration
Our own personal struggles with keeping track of finances are what inspired us to create this web application. Keeping track of week-to-week spending and understanding how much to budget for certain categories of products is difficult especially for college students, who are often not used to managing their own finances. That is why we thought that this sort of interactive, visualization-based application would be really useful.
What it does
Our project analyzes consumers' problems with overspending on certain kinds of products. We store users' spending information. Then, we present them with an analysis of their past versus current spending, visualizations of their spending habits, and personalized future spending plans. We also include some comparisons and fun facts to help them understand their spending patterns in an interesting, novel way.
How We built it
With data supplied by the Nessie API and processed through coding and algorithms, we take banking data (simulated for this demo) and analyze spending habits across certain periods of time. Our proprietary codebase smoothly and efficiently pulls data straight from the cloud, delivering solutions to users in the blink of an eye. Our polished front-end, styled with HTML and CSS, provides an aesthetically pleasing medium for our service.
Challenges We ran into
We had trouble generating the MicroStrategy embedded analytics automatically, as the API wasn't built for that. We also ran into bugs while using the Nessie API. Besides these, we ran into countless errors with our own code (mostly figuring out HTTP Requests, fitting the Python, HTML/CSS, and Firebase functionality together), but we are glad for the experience.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We are proud to have embedded MicroStrategy diagrams that are unique to each user. We are also proud that we were able to use Firebase for our login server and database. Finally, we are proud that we have designed an intuitive and palatable web app.
What I learned
We learned how a web app is made, and about all the different parts required to make an app functional. We also learned how to use several new tools: both those provided to us by our sponsors and those we chose for ourselves. Almost all of the tools and code we wrote were new to at least one member of our team. We all grappled with something that challenged us, and eventually, we learned it.
What's next for Spend Good?
We plan to develop this web app into something more complete. Some of our ideas weren't implemented as flexible as we would have liked, and we are excited to address those shortcomings. We are optimistic that perhaps a version of this app will reach the market one day.
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