Managing your money isn’t easy, so it’s no wonder that only 41% of Americans have a budget, according to the National Foundation for Credit Counseling. Several personal finance apps and websites can help you plan and keep track of your spending. But many such services aren't very easy-to-use and not very suitable for laymen. We felt the need to build a project that makes expense tracking and management an easy-peasy affair. So, we decided to build a bot for this purpose as that would simplify the process a lot more and can be performed by simply sending chat messages.
Fin-Bot can be used to keep track and manage your expenses and review your spending habits. You can get started by setting a monthly budget based on your preference. Each time you spend money, you can let Fin-Bot know the details by just sending a message regarding the amount and the purpose. Fin-Bot shall keep track of all your expenditure events. You can then request information about these expenditures anytime later. This will help ensure credible spending habits and also pave the way to achieve your long-term financial goals. Fin-Bot can also send warnings if it detects overspending in accordance with your monthly budget.
The Bot was built with the help of Telegram API. We created a python script to handle the bot's incoming messages and send corresponding replies.
It was our very first time building a Telegram Bot, so there were quite some amount of challenges along the way. We had to scourge through online resources to get a head start and things weren't easy since we hadn't made use of any libraries to build the Bot.
We're proud that we could build a greatly useful project to help people better manage their personal finance. We also take pride in having tried out and learned something new this weekend, which is, building a Telegram Bot.
We learned to build a fully functional Telegram Bot and manage the messages using python.
We're planning to provide analytic features for better understandability and review of user spending habits. Fin-Bot could also provide graphs and diagrams based on the user's expenditure data. Enhancing user experience and better chat features are also on the cards.