Deduction Buddy

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Information about sale vs income tax
Upload sale information

Inspiration

As college students about to enter the “real world” and about to do our own taxes, we’re worried how difficult it is to correctly do our own taxes. People like accountants and whatnot have methods of optimizing your tax return so that you can get the most deductions that you deserve! One way is deciding between taking the sales tax deduction vs the income tax deduction. However, taking the sales tax deduction requires you to save your receipts and track your running total!

What it does

Deduction Buddy is a phone app where you can enter in your sales tax for every receipt and it will help you in deciding if you qualify for a bigger tax deduction using sales tax or your income tax.

How we built it

We designed the app using Figma and used React Native and Expo to prototype it.

Challenges we ran into

It was our first time working with React Native! The setup was difficult as well as finding the right packages that worked for the job. Also, this is our designer’s first hackathon and her first time working on an app like this also. Figuring out layouts using flex was difficult too.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The fact that the app even remotely works :D

Our goal at this hackathon was really to work with a mobile app for the first time. While we have some experience with normal web development through React, designing and coding for mobile was a whole other challenge and we really stepped out of our own knowledge base to work with React Native this time.