Hello there! 👋 Further development on this project has ceased; well, unless the forks say otherwise. Please note that most, if not all, of the code in this repository was written in the "hackathon rush". Thus, the codebase does not adhere to well-known industry practices and/or standards - it's quite messy (as expected for short-term rapid prototyping). Also, the GCP project associated with this repository has been terminated. Please do not consider this codebase as an example of representative work from any of the contributors. 😀
Latin translation: 'Finance'
Fisci is a finance management web application that helps small businesses and individuals track their spending to become more financially responsible. The app was developed in collaboration with Brian Evans, Randolph Liu, Anya Sims, and Bryan Ang as a submission for Hex Cambridge 2020.
Due to lockdowns across the world, many individuals and small businesses have struggled financially; this inspired us to make managing finances simple while offering helpful insights into a user's spending habits.
With Fisci, users have the ability to enter their transaction history through the transaction table tab and analyse their spending patterns through the insights page. Users also have a guide page containing curated resources on how to be financially stable; this page also includes resources for small businesses on COVID guidelines and funding.
Fisci has a React.js front-end and a Python Flask back-end. The back-end on Google Cloud Run (GCR) instance and the front-end is served through Firebase hosting. Further, the domain was registered through Domain.com and the transaction records are stored in a Cassandra database from Datastax Astra.
The team was quite new to Firebase authentication and using CQL for the database. The former took quite a lot of time to setup and experiment with, but ultimately we didn't have enough time to include it in the final product. However, it was indeed a great learning opportunity to learn how to set it up. The Material UI documentation was quite cumbersome to go through, and the sheer size of the library proved quite overwhelming
We're proud of having a lightning fast backend and a smooth-as-butter, minimalist front-end that provides a great user experience.
We're also proud of have learned quite a lot about developing web apps in React with Python Flask as a backend - the part of linking the app with Google Cloud was particularly interesting. We also learned how to collaborate better by paralellising tasks and gained technical knowlege from one another.
Our next steps is to polish the app and link it with Firebase authentication (Sign-in with Google) and to add time-series prediction based on transaction history. We also plan on making the app mobile compatible with features to scan receipts and invoices and automatically populate the transaction table. A big step would be to use an OpenBanking API to automatically feed in the user transactions from their bank account. Also, we plan on adding a subscription (renewal payments) tracker that would remind users when a subscription is due.