Vuna

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  The logo for Vuna, Expressing how we expect your Finance to raise Patronizing us

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  We all love to know how we spend our money, so why not put down your expenses

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  We've got a goal to reach, something we want, well, goes help you see in real-time how close you are to achieving your dream

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  Income page to login your income on a daily or monthly, maybe even yearly bases so as to help vuna help you plan

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  The Dashboard, A quick and brief overview of your financial status and goals

Inspiration

Every month, millions of African freelancers face the same invisible problem — not that they don't earn enough, but that they can't see where their money goes. A graphic designer in Accra gets paid in cedis. A developer in Lagos invoices in dollars. A writer in Nairobi earns in shillings. None of them have a tool built for their reality — irregular income, multiple currencies, and months where work just dries up. We've all felt it. You check your account at the end of the month and wonder where it all went. You know you worked hard. You know money came in. But you can't explain the gap. That's what inspired Vuna.

What it does

Vuna is a personal finance dashboard built specifically for African freelancers. It helps you:

• Log every payment you receive — from mobile money, bank transfers, cash, or any source
• Track daily expenses by category — food, transport, tools, rent, and more
• Set savings goals and watch your progress over time — a new laptop, school fees, an emergency fund
• Quick Log shortcuts — add your daily regulars like transport or food as one-tap shortcuts. You tap, enter today's amount, and it's logged. No forms, no friction
• Smart insights — Vuna analyses your spending month over month and tells you when you're overspending in a category, when income is dropping, or when a dry season is coming before it hits you
• Light and dark mode with accent colour customisation — because your money tracker should feel like yours ## How we built it Vuna was built using React with Vite as the build tool, plain CSS with CSS custom properties for the full theming system, and localStorage for data persistence so everything works offline with no backend required. The project was structured as a proper multi-file React application with reusable components, a dedicated utility layer for data operations, and a clean separation between pages and shared UI elements. The requirements document was generated using MeDo, which gave us a clear and detailed specification to build against. The actual application was then implemented in React based on that specification. ## Challenges we ran into
• Building for real African user behaviour — things like inconsistent transport costs (station to station trotro rides), mixed currency income, and the reality that people log expenses on the go pushed us to rethink the Quick Log feature entirely. Fixed amounts don't work when prices change every day, so we made the amount flexible per log while keeping the shortcut pre-filled
• Making the theme system work fully — getting CSS custom properties to cascade correctly across light/dark mode AND accent colour simultaneously required careful structuring of the variable system
• Keeping it genuinely simple — the hardest design decision was what NOT to build. Currency conversion, invoicing, and team accounts were all cut to keep Vuna fast and focused ## Accomplishments that we're proud of
• A fully working finance tracker that solves a real problem for a real audience
• The dry season warning — an insight that detects when your income is dropping below your usual average and warns you before you feel it
• A Quick Log system that actually respects how chaotic daily spending is in West Africa
• A clean, professional UI that works on both mobile and desktop ## What we learned
• Designing for a specific cultural context forces you to make better product decisions than designing for everyone
• The requirements document from MeDo was genuinely useful as a north star — having a spec to build against kept the project focused
• localStorage is underrated for demo-ready apps that need to work offline ## What's next for Vuna
• User accounts — so data syncs across devices
• Live currency conversion — using real exchange rates for multi-currency users
• Mobile app — a React Native version optimised for on-the-go logging
• MoMo integration — automatic transaction detection from mobile money providers
• Budget planning — set monthly spending limits per category and get alerted when approaching them

Built With

• css
• jsx
• localstorage
• medo
• react
• vite