WiseWallet

Inspiration

One of our teammates had been wanting to work on this project for a long time but hadn't had the time to start it. He was annoyed with inputting the expenses on his receipt manually in excel sheets and tired of keeping these receipts whilst also forgetting why they were kept As soon as this problem was discussed, we knew that it was the project we wanted to tackle during our first hackathon.

What it does

It scans a receipt or uses the picture of a receipt and uses handwriting recognition to recognize the letters, words, and special characters and then creates a breakdown of expenses. Basically with the codes on the receipt we'll be able to classify each expense and distribute these expenses in different categories to see how much was spent on each category per a certain amount of time. For example, a Costco purchase of 9.11$ on ground beef will be classified within the category "food". People will be able to personalize these categories and put on warnings if they want to limit their expenses on a certain category or over a certain period of time.

How we built it

We compiled data and created a Scanner that will automatically recognize what is written on a receipt and classify it using a back-end that we created with the help of java. We are also using a very basic front-end interface written with Html since we weren't very proficient and had no prior knowledge of front-end coding.

Challenges we ran into

Our project was way more ambitious than we initially thought, so we had to make the project more simple than expected. However, we will present the ideas and solutions that we initially wanted to implement in our presentation and ways that they are achievable to prove that they are realistic.
Also, our Tess4J library, that we used to convert image to text, seems to be not compatible with mac, so we could only use it on a pc running Windows OS.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As first years, we aren't expecting much in terms of competition with people with much more experience than us. However, we are very proud that we pushed through and managed to present our ideas and a product that is working although there is a lot to improve on.

What we learned

We learned many things as first years in our first hackathon. The workshops provided us with much insight into various topics such as interesting new tools, how it is to live as an engineer, etc. We also managed to learn more about GitHub and Html as well as which skills we need to improve on. We also managed to elevate our skills in the coding languages that we were already comfortable in; mostly Java.

What's next for WiseWallet

Hopefully, we can actually develop this project into an app that will help people with managing their budgets and make it public and accessible to all.