☁️ Inspiration

Saving money is very important. In today's world, there are many ways to save money, but have you ever wanted to track your expenses? See how much you spend per category? With The Bill $aver, you can do just that.

🚧 What It Does

View Bills 👀

This is the most basic functionality of this application. It allows a user to see previously-stored bills. The app stores it in the blockchain, so it can't be tampered with at any time, and so the bank statements and other private information cannot be hacked or leaked.

Create Bills 🤖

The user can upload bills, their names, and categories into the application. With Hedera's blazing fast API, the bills are instantly uploaded and pop up immediately. The user interface is very friendly and is not confusing at all.

See Trends 👨‍💻

The user can see a trend in their spending. This is important to see the bigger picture, and not just individual reports.

Reminders, Games, and Tips ✨

This application sends reminders to upload bills. This helps the user not forget to upload bills. On top of that, the user can access many games to play and tips to help them save money.

👨🏾‍💻 How We Built It

For uploading the code, we used GitHub. To code/host the project, we used Replit and Code Sandbox. In this application, we mainly used Hedera.
Hedera's easy-to-use functions, namely FileCreateTransaction and FileContentsQuery, helped out a lot. 100% of the data and files (bills) are stored using Hedera's TestNet interface. This was the first time we were using Hedera, and the informative docs helped build our application.
The other service we used was Google Cloud, in 3 ways, Google Firebase and Google Cloud Functions. Google Firebase was used for authentication and Google Cloud Functions was used to handle various server requirements.
Google Cloud helped out a lot in building the application, and we really liked it. For the reminders, games, and tips part, we used Twilio's power.
The Twilio chatbot can send tips, games, and reminders. An example can be found in the image gallery. Finally, the main application was made using React.

👷 Challenges We Ran Into

We ran into numerous issues and some of them are the following-

Mainly, it was our first time using Hedera, and it took some time to set up.
On the other hand, we had used Google Cloud before, but Bill Saver allowed us to dig the docs literally.
In addition to coding problems, we were all across the globe, so we had 1-2 hours of overlapping time. Though there were numerous roadblocks, we were able the complete the application.

🎉 Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

We actually finished the entire application...yay!
We're proud to have built an app that uses Hedera's powerful APIs allowing us to decentralise the app.
We learned to use many services and different APIs. We all extended our knowledge in React and CSS and Firebase Auth, along with backend development with python.
You can find a detailed list of accomplishments by reading 👷 Challenges We Ran Into and 📙 What We Learned.

📙 What We Learned

We learned many things while building this application-

Firstly, the several services. Hedera, Google Cloud, and Twilio were the main things we had to learn. Each had its own library syntax, which we had to learn.
We also learned how to work together. As we were all in different time zones, communication was difficult. In the end, we achieved and learned a lot which is most important!

🔜 What's Next For The Bill $aver

This application can be improved in many ways. Firstly, the styling can be better. We can add more games, and have a friendlier interface. The code can be done better, and overall the application can improve.