Centi

Banking apps are good at showing what happened inside one account, but they do not always give a useful picture of how money is moving across everything together.

The data itself is also inconsistent. Merchant names are messy, transfers can look like spending, and one purchase can arrive with very little context. The real problem was not displaying transactions. It was making the information feel understandable.

I treated the dashboard like an explanation layer instead of trying to fit every possible number onto the first screen. The overview should answer where the money is going and what changed before the user has to inspect individual transactions.

I kept the visual language fairly calm because financial products can become stressful quickly. The interface needed to feel useful and readable, not like it was constantly warning the user that every purchase was a mistake.

React handles the interface, FastAPI serves the application and integration logic, and PostgreSQL stores accounts, transactions, users, and categories.

Plaid became the main source for connected account data, but I kept CSV and manual entry paths because a personal finance view is incomplete if it can only understand one provider.

The frontend is deployed through Vercel, while the API and database run through Railway. Building those pieces separately forced me to learn much more about authentication, environment configuration, cross-origin requests, and production deployment than a local school project would have.

The data was harder than the dashboard. Merchant cleanup, duplicate handling, transfers, refunds, and categories all create edge cases that are easy to ignore until the app starts using real transactions.

It was also my first time owning the entire application outside a class project, so every missing piece became mine to solve, including authentication, deployments, API failures, database changes, and the design itself.

Centi became a working personal finance product and the project that moved me from building assignments to thinking through a full application as one connected system.

Centi runs account syncing, categorized spending views, and a health summary on one deployed stack, covering API integration, data modeling, authentication, and the quieter work required to make a dashboard feel trustworthy.

The next version would improve categorization by learning from user corrections, add clearer forecasting, and make the main spending story feel even more immediate on mobile.