Alfred

Alfred is the CFO that every small business deserves, but could never afford.

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Inspiration

Alfred doesn't run Wayne Enterprises, Bruce Wayne does. But Alfred is always there in the background, managing, organizing, and catching things that Bruce would miss so he could focus on what matters. That's what this app is. Small business owners are doing everything themselves they don't have a finance team watching for duplicate charges or vendors quietly raising prices. Alfred is that quiet, reliable person in the background. He/it tells you what needs to be done.

What it does

Our project allows you to upload your bank or credit card statements and our program automatically cleans the data, normalizes vendor names, and analyzes your spending across months. It's able to catch things that you'd never have the time to find yourself. This includes duplicate charges, vendors slightly raising prices, subscriptions, etc. It then gives you two clear actions, either negotiate with the big vendors using an AI powered phone call or cancel the small charges using a pre drafted email.

How we built it

We used a multitude of frame works such as Twilllo, Hugging Face, Expo, Negotiation LLM, React Native, Bland AI, Supabase, and other frameworks. Our opportunity detection runs as supabase edge functions and the AI negotiation calls are powered via various voice AI integration containerized using docker. Additionally, Postgres was implemented for views of the analytics.

Challenges we ran into

One of the major challenges we ran in to was how were we going to turn a financial dashboard into something that separates us from the rest of the world (WOW FACTOR!). What we noticed was that everyone was using AI to assist with visuals, or provide word feedback, but no one was able to leverage AI in a way where it actually assists you without you having to do any extra work. Thats when we came up with the idea of the voice negotiations

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're extremely proud of our turnaround time for this project and our ability to collaborate as a group to figure out the various frameworks and technologies needed. This was our first time working together and with that comes challenges with regards to how your team-mates code and what their "best practices" are. Luckily for us, we were able to get past this phase relatively quick and have created a product which we're all proud of.

What we learned

We learned how to think as full-stack engineers rather than individually frontend or backend. An example of this is the technologies we used and how quickly we were able to decide on what we were going to try and accomplish with them. Expo, is the biggest hurdle we all had to come over. For those who aren't aware, it is a framework that allows you to develop as both a mobile app, and a website at the same time. In saying this, that was the challenge we set ourselves up for. We built our project as both an app, and a website, something none of us have done yet.

What's next for Alfred

Something we discussed was the use of real bank accounts to be able to automatically funnel transactions as opposed to uploading a csv file. This is the end-goal however it's not an easy task given our time frame. Additionally, we're proud of our AI, however it would need to be improved before any consideration of publishing.

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