RookiePay

RookiePay is designed for young, hard-working earners with part-time jobs to budget their expenses based on their wants, needs, and goals.

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Inspiration

Charlotte, a member of our team, has been working since the age of 13. From being an umpire to working in food preparation, her long-standing commitment to hard work and high-quality service is a reflection of her determination to earn what she works for. However, being a part-time employee means having a fluctuating monthly income that can be hard to track and budget. Our team noticed that multiple young and part time earners also experience this inconvenience. As future engineers, we strive to create innovative technology that addresses real-world problems just like these. Recognizing the issue, our team decided to create a website that helps part-time earners budget and manage their monthly income more effectively.

What it does

RookiePay is a website where young, part-time earners can manage their income, budget their expenses and saving goals, and view their financial records through customizable color themes to match their personality. When signing up for RookiePay, users select their role as an Individual, Parent, or Child, as each role has its specialized feature. If the user is signed up as an individual or child, the user will be able to use all of RookiePay's features, except for Parental Supervision. However, the child user must input a family invite code (provided by a parent user) to become a user in our database, while the individual user does not have to. If the user is signed up as a parent, the user will be given an invite code for child users to be added to the family. Additionally, our Parental Supervision feature allows parental users to view their children's balance, spending, and recent transactions, while setting up savings goals for them.

How we built it

With the assistance of GitHub Copilot, we developed an HTML and CSS website in VSCode. We started out with the features that we wanted to see in the website and then when to work on making that happen. A lot of this was used with the assistance of AI in both a guiding and creative manner. VSC's live server extension, high rate testing, and debugging allowed quick turn arounds and upgrades to the site. This combined with an organized idea with what we wanted to accomplish and how the backend data structure on firebase should work allowed for the timely creation of this site.

Challenges we ran into

Integrating the Firebase systems into our backend development without any prior knowledge to how they work was a major challenge for us. We wanted a secure data management system that handles the user's personal financial records and account settings. Unfortunately, we only knew about what Firebase had to offer and not necessarily how to integrate it. Through time, persistence, and some research, we were able to integrate a secure log-in/sign-up page and save financial transactions, savings goals, and thematic preferences. This experience taught us the mechanics of Firebase and how to integrate it's systems into future database projects.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have added a feature we never taught we could accomplish with the given time frame, which is the Parental Supervision feature. The Parental Supervision feature allows parents to monitor a child's balance, savings, and recent transactions, while setting additional savings goals for their child. We thought we would never accomplish this feature in time, but through persistence, we managed to create a viewable portal.

What we learned

We learned a lot of new technical concepts that can be integrated into future projects and even our careers. For example, the Firebase data management system taught us the mechanics of data management. HTML Web Development taught us how to create a user-friendly and functional website.

Most importantly, we learned how to work together. This was our first time working on a full-stack project together, so it was an experience to see our compatibility, skills, and ideas come together to create something that can impact hard-working young earners.

What's next for RookiePay

In order to unlock the sites full potential, we want to collaborate with established banks to create an automated budgeting system. With this collaboration, we can create a smoother and easier experience for users who have to manually enter their income and expenses details by automatically linking these information from the banking system to RookiePay. Furthermore, this automated system will help make calculating the allotment of bills more accurate with less effort.

Additionally, we would like to create a more in depth parent portal. We want to add a feature wherein by selecting their child’s profile, parents can open a dashboard similar to their own, allowing them to view the child’s balance, savings progress, transactions, and financial activity in one organized space. This personalized view makes it easier for parents to monitor and guide their child’s budgeting and savings goals.

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