ACC Timebank
- Client
- Alachua Community Collective, a mutual-aid group in Florida
- Team
- Purple Peak Consulting, a student consulting team
- Role
- Lead developer on the quick hit track, requirements gathering across both tracks
- Built with
- Google Apps Script, Google Sheets
- Recognition
- KPMG Choice Award, Best Overall System
- Running cost
- $0
What ACC needed
ACC runs a time bank. Members trade hours of work rather than money, so an hour of yard care earns an hour of someone else's help later. Tracking that by hand stops working as soon as the group grows, and a wrong balance is a real dispute between neighbors. They came to us with no budget, volunteer administrators rather than technical staff, and member intake already running through a Google Form.
How we solved it
ACC asked for two options: something fast built on tools they already had, and a fuller custom system. I led the first and did most of the requirements gathering across both.
I started in AppSheet and moved off it once it became clear the ledger needed multi-step logic the tool fought me on at every change. The rebuild used Google Apps Script with a Google Sheet as the database. That choice was about the client rather than the technology: intake already wrote to a Sheet, so there was no migration, no new accounts, and no new tool for members to learn. Administrators could open their own data in something they already understood. A real database would have been cleaner and would have been the wrong recommendation.
What it does
- A verified ledger. Hours count only once both sides confirm them, so nobody can credit themselves by filing alone.
- A request lifecycle from posted through to completed, with contact details withheld until both people agree to the match. That came straight out of requirements gathering with ACC.
- Youth accounts. Minors participate, so a guardian is linked to the record and acts on the child's behalf. This was not in the original brief. It came from asking who actually uses the system.
- Admin reporting for verifying members, resolving disputed transactions and voiding bad rows without destroying history.
- A burnout-risk flag that surfaces members giving far more than they receive, because that pattern predicts someone quietly dropping out of the time bank.
- A Python migration script that moved existing Google Form responses into the new structure, so the system launched with the real membership already in it.
Handing it over
The system had to outlive the semester, so the deliverable included a written runbook for administrators who had never opened Apps Script: standing the whole thing up from an empty Google account, a test script to run before anyone real touches it, the routine administration tasks, and a troubleshooting list of the failures I expected them to hit.
That document is the part of this project closest to the IT work I am applying for. A system a volunteer cannot operate or recover without calling the person who built it is not finished.
Where it stands
Purple Peak Consulting received the KPMG Choice Award for Best Overall System at the capstone showcase. The engagement has since ended and ACC no longer runs the system, so there is no public demo and no public repository.
The second track, a fuller build on ASP.NET Core and Azure SQL, was a teammate's work. My contact with it was confirming that CSV exports from my side imported cleanly into theirs. They did.