Paywise

Inspiration

I realised that my dad carries a lot of credit cards, but only ever uses 1-2 of them. The rest just stay in his wallet collecting dust and fees :/. However, most credit cards come with reward systems. Discounts, cash backs and rebates whenever you spend on a specific service. That’s when I realised that we had to come up with a software that recommends the best credit card to use given the situation. Thus, PayWise was born.

What it does

Paywise is simple. You just tell it how much you are spending and on what, and it will give you a card recommendation and how much you will save if you were to use it. It also logs all your expenditure and shows the data in a pie chart to give the user a visual representation on how much of their money they spend on each type of purchase, and how much they spend on their credit cards. It also helps to ensure that all the cards are used within their credit limits. It also highlights underutilised cards that the user can consider cancelling and save money.

How we built it

The logic was built with python for the logic portion, while the main app was built with java script with node.js framework.

Challenges we ran into

Collecting data from various credit cards. We realised that some of them had very complicated rewards system, which made it harder for us to gauge how we wanted to enter its data into the dataset. We ended up simplifying some parts to make it easier for demonstration. Implementing the pie chart visualisation was also a challenge.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

We managed to build a full fledged app within a day. Some of us in the group were not familiar with coding as well. But we learnt a lot by helping each other out n showing each other how we did things. We enjoyed building the app and learning from each other to grow each other, which I am really proud of.

What we learned

We managed to hon our coding skills by taking on this unique challenge. Especially in the field of software engineering by building an app, and learning how to manipulate data.

What’s next for PayWise

We want to add more financial planning enhancing features to better help users save money and make the best use of their financial tools.