Spendly | Devpost

app's home page

Inspiration

Our current society consists of a fast-paced lifestyle, whether it is adults on-the-go with their jobs and responsibilities or college students struggling to manage between their academic life and social life. As college students who experiences similar struggles, we decided to program an app/website service that can alleviate the additional stress of having to manage our expenses on top of dealing with college tuition. We want this service to be accessible to everyone, so anyone can conveniently keep track of their transactions and budget their expenses efficiently to positively impact their lifestyle.

What it does

This service will have an application where the user can take a picture of their receipts of their transactions on their phone. Then, the program will send the information from their receipt to a database where it will be scanned, deciphered, and transferred to the website. From the website, they can access a personalized graph of their transactions that will be categorized based on what they bought after making an account. The website will contain a dashboard that will include those features while also including a map that will mark the locations of where they buy things. This will show the user their trends of where and what they typically purchased.

How We Built It

First, we made an Android app on Android Studios that will allow the user to take a picture of their receipts while also implementing some custom design features. Then, we used Visual Studio to create our website. Our website consists of a home page where users can log in and a dashboard that will display their transactions and a map of their transactions.

Challenges We ran into

One of the challenges we ran into was the fact that we had a big impactful project, but as we tried to program it, there were some learning curves. It was mostly due to having to learn the syntax of different programming languages we were not exposed to much, such as HTML, Java, and JSON. Another major challenge we ran into was learning how to use Android Studios. Android Studios has a lot of powerful tools, but due to our lack of experience, it was difficult to grasp how to use it and program an app with it.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are proud of the fact that we made our first app that can do small functions. It is not easy to program an app with a difficult program we just recently learned, but being able to build and run it smoothly was an accomplishment.

What We Learned

This event has definitely expanded our knowledge, not only familiarizing ourselves with more variety of programming languages, but also learning how to implement API's to send user's inputs into a database and output it in a helpful way. We learned how to create a website using HTML and build our user interface on it while collaborating it with an app.

What's next for Spendly

Hopefully, Spendly can continue to improve its user interface and implement more functionality with its base purpose such as notifying the user if they're about to reach their budget limit and sending the user a weekly overview of how much money went into specific categories per week.