Capital Budgeting

Finance with finesse. Integrated with Alexa and Echo Show for hands-free help.

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Inspiration

Whether it's eating out too much or not realizing that the lease you signed is way too expensive, budgeting is hard for college students. We wanted to help fix that. Introducing: Capital Budgeting - an innovative way to track your money and where you spend it.

What it does

We have a web-based app that tracks recent transactions, budget, and is integrated with Google Gemini to provide you with an on-demand, helpful AI financial assistant that can help you create a budget or talk you through your finance goals. Furthermore, to encourage positive budgeting habits, we’ve integrated smart home compatibility with Alexa, allowing you to easily check your budget statistics and discover businesses within your price range nearby. Finally, we have a merchant dashboard that allows vendors to add their businesses to our database easily.

How we built it

We created an API that could pull data from the Capital One Nessie API, add any additional data that we wanted, and save it to a MongoDB database. We used Python to generate mock data and Flask to build the API. For the website, we used React and TypeScript, and for the Alexa integration, we used the Alexa Skills Kit SDK along with AWS Lambda to handle user interactions and connect with our backend services.

Challenges we ran into

We knew we wanted more data than Nessie would be able to provide, so we spent some time thinking about how we could have that data while also making our API calls efficient. Our custom API fixes that by fetching Nessie's data but also caching user inputted data into a custom database. We also saved merchant information, recent transactions, and more. We had no experience programming an Alexa skill before, and the documentation was a bit limited, so we spent a lot of time debugging and figuring things out and, in particular, getting the Echo Show to display the interface components that we wanted.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We got all of our components to work! The Alexa integration especially is something that we are proud to be able to pull off.

What we learned

Through this project, we learned how to build and connect multiple technologies across different platforms. Our project involved creating an API, developing a React + TypeScript frontend, and creating an additional frontend with Alexa. We also gained experience troubleshooting cross-platform issues, understanding the flow of data between components, and designing user-friendly voice and visual interfaces.

What's next for Capital Budgeting

Moving forward, we plan to expand Capital Budgeting by integrating more real-world financial data sources and refining our business recommendation engine. We also aim to enhance the Alexa experience by enabling more conversational interactions and personalized budgeting insights. In the future, we hope to include gamification features and social accountability tools to make managing your budget more engaging and rewarding.

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