FLATMATES

Authors

• Giacomo Lancerin
• Matteo Minnucci

Abstract

During university years spent living with flatmates, the challenges of coordinating shared household activities became increasingly evident. Managing household information across multiple platforms (such as Google Calendar for shared events, Treecount for expense tracking, and Google Docs for shopping lists) has created inefficiencies that prevent smooth household collaboration. This fragmentation motivated the development of Flatmates, a unified web application designed to consolidate all shared household management needs into a single, integrated platform.

Flatmates addresses this challenge by providing a comprehensive interface for coordinating calendars, tracking expenses, managing shopping lists, and organizing house settings. The application features a clean, intuitive frontend built with Streamlit, enabling flatmates to easily access and manage all household information without requiring technical expertise. The backend, developed using FastAPI, provides robust APIs for managing calendar events, expense splits, shopping items, and house configurations, with data persisted in a lightweight SQLite database.

The core features include a shared calendar for scheduling events and coordinating activities, an expense manager that tracks shared costs and simplifies bill splitting, a collaborative shopping list for household necessities, and configurable house settings. By consolidating these functionalities into a single application, Flatmates eliminates the inefficiencies caused by fragmented information across multiple third-party tools.

The application is designed with simplicity and accessibility in mind, allowing any flatmate to quickly understand and use all features without prior technical knowledge.