Most budgeting apps stop at showing you a list of transactions. The harder, more useful problem is turning a messy, real-time bank feed into something that tells you when to pay attention — a missed paycheck, a subscription that quietly went up, a budget about to blow — plus one honest read on whether your finances are improving. That's an engineering problem as much as a finance one.
Live transaction, balance, and account data from real financial institutions via Plaid's Production environment, synced on a schedule and normalised through a TypeScript cleaning pipeline that resolves pending transactions, deduplicates, and maps merchants before anything reaches the UI.
A React + TypeScript front end over an Express + Prisma API, with Clerk handling authentication and a node-cron job pulling fresh data daily. The core logic is a seven-detector alerts engine (large transactions, budget pace, low balance, missed paycheck, subscription price hikes, and more) and a transparent 0–100 financial-health score that weights distinct signals so the number is explainable, not a black box.
The result is a working product, not a prototype: real bank data flowing through a daily pipeline into seven live alert detectors and an explainable health score.
The engineering signal is the point — authentication, a typed data pipeline, scheduled jobs, and a real third-party financial integration, end to end.
This is the project to point to when a role wants full-stack range alongside data work — it proves the ability to ship a real, secure, integrated application, not just analyse a static dataset. The next step on its own roadmap is hardening for multi-user scale: a custom domain and a managed VPS deployment.