Finance Friend

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Insights page - continued
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Inspiration

Being at university, we found that there is a sudden shift in having everything provided for you, to now having to keep track of every penny that is spent. Many students do not have a lot of money to spend, and the money they do have is usually poorly managed. We wanted to create something that students could use to manage and save money in a very easy and digestible way.

What it does

Finance Friend will take in the amount of money you spend, along with your financial responsibilities and create graphics displaying what money is coming in, and what money is coming out. It also provides the user with tips and advice to think about regarding their spending habits.

How we built it

Starting out, we brainstormed all of our ideas on Google docs and then got to work making it. Both the website layout and logo were designed using Figma. For the frontend we used VueJs and for the backend we used FastAPI, Python and PostgresSQL.

Challenges we ran into

A challenge that we faced was sorting out the logistics of getting all of the various parts of the project working together. We spent the majority of our time on building the foundations of the project, and only saw the website come together on the last day.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As this is our first hackathon, we’re proud that we managed to get together to complete a project in such a short amount of time. We’re particularly happy with the clean and modern look of the website and the visualisations, which we think would be appealing to students. We're also proud that we used the API provided by Capital One for all of our data without modifying it to fit our desired output. Additionally, we have put a lot of effort into things which aren't visible in the end product - such as securely storing all of our user data, locking down endpoints using JSON web tokens and ensuring the website is responsive on all devices.

What we learned

We learned that as well as coming up with a good idea, it’s important to be able to turn that idea into a project quickly. As we only had a few days, we needed to be able to manage our time well and split tasks between ourselves to make sure that we would be able to get everything done. We also learned the hard way the importance of sleep.

What's next for Finance Friend

Overall, we’re pretty happy with how Finance Friend turned out. In the future, we’d like to implement more tips and advice. We also think that it could be cool to implement an achievement system, which we think would appeal to students and make finances more fun.