CashDat

A simple way to track who owes you money, and who you owe when you pay for one another, then request to get paid!

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Inspiration

The inspiration for this project was drawn from the daily experiences of our team members. As post-secondary students, we often make purchases for our peers for convenience, yet forget to follow up. This can lead to disagreements and accountability issues. Thus, we came up with the idea of CashDat, to alleviate this commonly faced issue. People will no longer have to remind their friends about paying them back! With the available API’s, we realized that we could create an application to directly tackle this problem.

What it does

CashDat is an application available on the iOS platform that allows users to keep track of who owes them money, as well as who they owe money to. Users are able to scan their receipts, divide the costs with other people, and send requests for e-transfer.

How we built it

We used Xcode to program a multi-view app and implement all the screens/features necessary.

We used Python and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) built inside Google Cloud Vision API to implement text extraction using AI on the cloud. This was used specifically to draw item names and prices from the scanned receipts.

We used Google Firebase to store user login information, receipt images, as well as recorded transactions and transaction details.

Figma was utilized to design the front-end mobile interface that users interact with. The application itself was primarily developed with Swift with focus on iOS support.

Challenges we ran into

We found that we had a lot of great ideas for utilizing sponsor APIs, but due to time constraints we were unable to fully implement them. The main challenge was incorporating the Request Money option with the Interac API into our application and Swift code. We found that since the API was in BETA made it difficult to implement it onto an IOS app. We certainly hope to work on the implementation of the Interac API as it is a crucial part of our product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall, our team was able to develop a functioning application and were able to use new APIs provided by sponsors. We used modern design elements and integrated that with the software.

What we learned

We learned about implementing different APIs and overall IOS development. We also had very little experience with flask backend deployment process. This proved to be quite difficult at first, but we learned about setting up environment variables and off-site server setup.

What's next for CashDat

We see a great opportunity for the further development of CashDat as it helps streamline the process of current payment methods. We plan on continuing to develop this application to further optimize user experience.

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