WanderStub

WanderStub Powerpoint Presentation

Inspiration

We had two inspirations.

The first one was that people in companies have responsibilities to go through large stacks of receipts travel reimbursements.
The second one was that travellers frequently stack up receipts in their bags while travelling. This leads to the possibility of losing them and difficult expense tracking. We wanted to develop a web application that improves the overall travelling experience by facilitating travellers’ tracking and recording of expenses during travel and auto-applying currency exchange rates for better management of personal finances.

With travelling being the second-fastest-growing sector in the world (raising $8.8 trillion dollars and providing 319 million jobs in 2018), we saw a need for this web application.

What it does

WanderStub offers users three main features.
First, it allows users to digitally track all generated receipts while travelling abroad by extracting and saving information from their receipts. Second, users can also retrieve the amounts on receipt with foreign exchange rate applied to the amounts. Lastly, users can plan their travel budget or compare their travel spending to other users from all over the world.

How we built it

For frontend development, we utilized Photoshop to edit existing images & custom create images. We also utilized Adobe XD to create a website template of our product and UI/UX design.
For the backend development, we chose Python and utilized Google Cloud Platform Machine Learning API libraries such as Google Cloud Vision API. We also used exchange rates API from another resource (https://exchangeratesapi.io/).

Challenges/Problems we ran into:

Understanding and using the GCP and GCP API(s).
Lack of full-stack development knowledge and experience within the team.
The format of receipts varies depending on many factors (e.g. type of vendor, vendor country location).
It is difficult to retrieve exchange rates based on the language indicated on the receipt (possible use of google
location API for accurate exchange rates info.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our use of the Google Vision API library. Although we never had experience with it, we were able to successfully incorporate it in our code.

What we learned

We learned the features of Google Cloud Platform, how to utilize some of Google Cloud APIs, Adobe XD and Photoshop.

What's next for WanderStub

We want to develop WanderStub into a complete web application that not only makes use of the features said above but also incorporate new features. One of these new features might include displaying an interactive map in which the users can do a deep-dive into countries, cities, and etc.. to see the average amount spent in the selected location. Another new feature can be indicating the presence of nearby landmarks or ongoing events that could have contributed to higher prices of certain vendors.