Visual Budgeting

The calendar view for transactions.
The form to enter transactions.
The summary view for transactions.

Inspiration

We decided to just pick a random prize category and see where our brainstorming took us. We thought that a lot of budgeting relied around spreadsheets and number entry, but it would be nice to see finance in a chronological layout, since that way people can visualize how they are spending their money over time, and not just how much they are spending.

What it does

The app has three views. The first is a form for users to input their recent transactions including a name, cost, date and category. The second page shows a summary list of all the transactions they've done so far, as well as a running total, and two visual views - a pie chart to visualize the proportion of spending on each category, and a line chart of the past week to track spending quantities over time. The third is a calendar view that lets users directly see on what date they made what transactions.

How we built it

We built it using Flutter, which uses Dart, a language for quick application building and designed for mobile apps.

Challenges we ran into

All of us were first time hackathon goers and have never done web development before, so it was a very steep learning curve. We spent the first half of the hacking period trying out different approaches because what worked on one person's laptop wouldn't work on another.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We completed the app to some minimum level of functionality, which is a great achievement for a first time hackathon goer. We all put a lot of work into it, staying up as late as 4.

What we learned

We learned Dart in a day, as well as the basics of web development, and what to look for when choosing a framework to develop your app. And we learned to not panic and believe that things will work out, even if it looks like a disaster 8 hours into the project.

What's next for Visual Budgeting

There was a lot of functionality we didn't add, such as a better UI and color palette, nicer layouts, more visualization models, suggestions to reduce spending such as choosing sustainable alternatives, and the ability to add income and subscriptions and see a running net balance throughout all the models. If we had more time, we would keep learning Flutter and try to implement these, as well as look at other frameworks and try them out.