SmartCents

Plan, save, invest. Cultivate YOUR financial sense ;)

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Inspiration

Finance is an important subject for everyone. For some, it's even more important to keep track of. Historically, women have faced a significant wage gap and have had to deal with issues like the glass ceiling. Our solution? A budget tracking app with built-in financial planning, salary comparisons, and opportunities to connect with women in business. And of course an adorable FinanceBuddy to help you stay on track!

What it does

SmartCents is a finance tracking and budget planning web app. It allows users to enter their finance goals, current spending, and custom input about what they've already been doing in terms of budgeting and investing, what they know about finance, and if they have any future plans. Our FinanceBuddy, Blobo, then takes the reins and suggests a customized plan as well as a categorized budget breakdown to help the user meet their finance goals! The dashboard keeps track of the user's progress and finances.

How we built it

We used ReactJS for the frontend and a simple server for the backend to run MongoDB, which was used to keep track of user credentials and data. We utilized Groq's chat completion API to generate a plan based on the user's input. Visual Studio Code served as our editor, and we used git to keep track of our team's version history.

Challenges we ran into

All of us were quite unfamiliar with the React library and frontend development in general, which meant every little thing took a lot of work (who would've thought making a box would take so long...) as we looked up multitudes of tutorials and documentation to learn as we went along. Setting up MongoDB was also a lot more challenging than we thought it would be due to some configuration technicalities, but after a lot of debugging, we got it up and running, and now we can securely store user data! And time... there just wasn't enough for everything we wanted to do! Having to put aside some of the features we wanted to implement was hard, but we'll come back to them when we get the chance :)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Honestly, everything! We're so proud that we made a functional application with a real frontend and backend, which was something none of us had ever done from start to end before. We used a bunch of new APIs and technologies, like Groq's AI and MongoDB, and experimented with things we'd never tried before. The whole project was a leap into the unknown, but we think it turned out pretty well for our experience level :D

What we learned

We learned so so much! React makes a looot more sense now (though we'd hardly call ourselves pros just yet haha). We learned more about UI design from a developer's perspective, which was definitely eye opening. And we now know how to connect a frontend and backend to make a functional website, which will be a super useful skill!

What's next for SmartCents

We'd love to complete and improve our frontend design and to add functionality to the user dashboard. One of the main features we didn't get the time to implement would be the connections page, so adding that page where people are matched with women in fields similar to their own would definitely be our next step. We're also aiming for more UI customizations, budget planning settings, and a chat service with Blobo. We wanted Blobo to be a representative avatar for users to "take care of" by making good financial decisions to add a more fun aspect as well.

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