E-countant

A tool that analyzes your bank account transactions to provide budgeting insights

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Inspiration

We decided to make E-countant because, to be quite frank, humans are irrational. We think short term and often forget to play the long game when it comes to our finances. E-countant helps everyday people jump into the same key habit that all of the wealthiest people in the world share: budgeting. With E-countant, it becomes easy to understand the steps to take to course correct your spending habits through clear and digestible visuals. We believe that money is at its best when we don't need to think about it - when it becomes seamless and no longer brings us those everyday anxieties. We believe every person deserves this right. E-countant hopes to bring this state of mind to all people.

What it does

E-countant will provide the user with a bar graph of how much money they spent on transactions per day of the week. This is done by using Captial One's Nessie API to parse through purchases from a user's bank account and calculating the total amount of money spent per day of the week. E-countant also provides additional info such as remaining balance and rewards.

How we built it

We started with Capital One's Nessie API and javaScript in order to make API calls to a sandbox of bank customers and their respective accounts. We parsed through each purchase in each of our user's accounts and organized each one by which day of the week it landed on. We then summed up the amount of money spent for each day of the week and displayed it on a bar graph created in HTML. Users are first introduced to the tool with a login page where they must log in with their full name and customer ID.

Challenges we ran into

We had challenges when it came to dealing with javaScript and nuances of the Nessie library. We especially had difficulty when it came to "require" statements since returning values from methods that use "require" proved to be very complicated. We also had issues with losing data due to moving to a new page on our website.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We used APIs! That big scary word that only nerds use? Yeah, I know what that is now. We got much more comfortable using APIs to solve actual problems. We also gained a lot of knowledge about javaScript. Most of our members knew no javaScript before coming into the hackathon. By the end, we had written hundreds of lines in a language we had never touched 24 hours prior.

What we learned

We learned mostly to be patient in debugging. We had one bug that took about 4 hours (3AM to 7AM), and it seemed impossible to beat. We had accepted our doom. But in the very last hour, I found a javaScript trick that solved our problem! This tool saved our project, and if we had given up, we would never have made a working prototype. We also learned to use APIs and how useful they can be in a real-world application that connects to the cloud. Most of us learned javaScript on the day of the competition as well.

What's next for BankingData

There is so much more to explore in the Nessie API, and so many more features we discussed. We want to add fraud detectors too based on anomalies in location or amount spent in a day. Later, we could develop AI models that can detect fraudulent activity. We also want to get this project into an app to make it even easier to budget. We also want to add more statistics, such as which locations on a map that the user tends to spend the most money.

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