Inspiration
Our team was talking about our finances and we noticed that we spent a ton of money on miscellaneous items. Ranging from eating out to shopping for clothes, spending money added up fast and we didn't have a platform to visualize our spending habits. We wanted to track that spending while also self-imposing limits that would alert us to be more conscious. Thus, Pocket Watcher was born
What it does
Pocket Watcher is a full-stack website that allows users to track their finances and use a finance-tailored AI to help guide their spending habits. The user can create their account, connect their bank account with Plaid to view their transactions, and then view all of them in interactive and appealing diagrams. The user can set their spending limits and dynamically see how close they are to reaching or exceeding that limit. Overall, Pocket Watcher is a new take on financial planning and is a sleek and dynamic app that is tailored towards college students.
How we built it
We built it mainly using React for the front-end features while using MongoDB, OpenAI, and Firebase as the back-end systems. Plaid was our API to connect to individual bank accounts and ensured multi-factor authentication to protect our users' data. Overall, the mix of Front-End technologies and Back-end helped give our users a complete financial planning experience
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge we ran into was connecting the front and Back-end. MongoDB and Plaid did not work well together and took a ton of troubleshooting to eventually read and parse all our user's data to be displayed. The OpenAI chatbot also was an issue because of the varying nature of AI bots and the need for financial prompt engineering
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud about creating an app that applies to college students and frankly all of our daily lives and puts a new spin on financial planning apps. We are proud to make a fully functional app that works across various platforms and all sorts of scenarios.
What we learned
We learned how to set up databases and how to dynamically update them inside React. We learned that it probably the hardest job to connect front end and back end and that we must be more concise with our collaboration and git branches.
What's next for Pocket Watcher
What's next is improving on the features we have including further emphasizing our AI chatbot and allowing it to keep a log of the user's session. This would allow the user to have a reliable resource to go to for financial advice and accurately predict what the user may spend in a given week or month.
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