Aria

Inspiration

Late invoices are choking Australian small businesses — chasing them is the most hated, lowest-leverage work in any company. There's literally a person whose full-time job is begging clients to pay. That's a textbook role for an autonomous agent: painful, repetitive, and perfectly suited to AI. So we asked — what if that person never had to exist?

What it does

Aria runs the full accounts-receivable loop autonomously. It sees overdue invoices, decides a tailored action per debtor — tone, channel, terms — using gpt-4o structured output, drafts and negotiates the message in a chat inbox, then collects via Pinch: a reusable percentage "Pay-in-3" Plan + Subscription + live Payment Link. A signed webhook reconciles the invoice the moment it's paid.

How we built it

Next.js 16 (App Router) + TypeScript + Tailwind + shadcn/ui + Framer Motion. The brain is OpenAI gpt-4o with zod-guarded structured outputs and a deterministic fallback. A typed Pinch REST client handles OAuth token caching and every Pinch primitive (Payer, Plan, Subscription, Payment Link, realtime). Supabase Postgres holds state; a signed HMAC webhook reconciles. Deployed on Vercel.

Challenges we ran into

OpenAI strict structured outputs reject .optional() zod fields — we switched to .nullable(). Next.js 16 makes every request API async. Our Vercel deploy 404'd until we set framework=nextjs explicitly. Pinch uses Application IDs, not merchant IDs, so we remapped our client. We also hardened Supabase (RLS + security_invoker view) after the advisor flagged it. Each was a real debugging dive.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It's genuinely live, end-to-end, on real rails — not a mockup. A real gpt-4o decision produces a real Pinch Plan, Subscription, and Payment Link; paying a test card fires a real signed webhook that flips the invoice to Paid. The wow moments land: the agent visibly thinks, invoices flip in 3D with confetti, and the recovered-cash counter counts up. It feels like magic that's actually wired.

What we learned

Payment integrations live or die on small details — exact field names, strict schema rules, signature formats, framework detection. Structured outputs are powerful but opinionated. The gap between a demo and a product is the last 10%: idempotent reconciliation, graceful fallbacks, and a UI that makes the intelligence visible. Resilience — a fallback agent and simulate path — saved the demo.

What's next for Aria

Wire real Xero/MYOB ingest (the typed adapter is already designed), add live email/SMS/WhatsApp channels, and bring card capture in-page via Pinch CaptureJs for a fully embedded pay experience. Then expand from AR into the broader autonomous finance department — payables, forecasting, financing against recovered-cash data. The wedge is receivables; the prize is the whole back office.

Built With

• app-router
• canvas-confetti
• framer-motion
• gpt-4o
• hmac
• next.js
• node.js
• oauth2
• openai
• pinch-payments
• postgresql
• react
• react-server-components
• rest
• shadcn/ui
• structured-outputs
• supabase
• tailwind-css
• turbopack
• typescript
• vercel
• webhooks
• zod