EZ Money- HelloHacks

Inspiration

We initially set out to build a personal finance tracker for students. However, as we dug deeper into the problem space, we realized that small, independent restaurants face far more acute financial bottlenecks with multiple moving parts—inventory costs, razor-thin margins, daily operational overhead, and unpredictable cash flow. Shifting our focus to restaurants allowed us to tackle a tangible, high-stakes problem for business owners who often lack dedicated financial tooling.

What it does

EZ Money is a financial intelligence and forecasting platform tailored for small restaurant owners. It enables operators to:

Track & Organize: Centralize daily operational expenses, ingredient purchasing, and revenue streams into a single dashboard.
Analyze Performance: Get clear breakdowns of margins, labor costs, and day-to-day cash flow without needing an accounting background.
Project the Future: Run forward-looking forecasts to understand how seasonality, price changes, and shifting foot traffic impact their bottom line.

How we built it

Version Control & Collaboration: Maintained a centralized GitHub repository with feature-branch workflows.
Development Environment: Built and tested locally within VS Code.
AI-Assisted Engineering: Leveraged modern developer workflows by pairing with AI agents (Claude Code and Codex) to rapidly scaffold boilerplate, debug logic, and iterate on dashboard components.

Challenges we ran into

Git Collaboration: Merging simultaneous branches under tight hackathon deadlines led to tricky merge conflicts across shared components.
Product Scope & Decision Paralysis: Deciding which metrics were essential for a restaurant MVP versus which would overcomplicate the dashboard required tough trade-offs.
Prompt Engineering & Agent Steering: Translating nuanced financial workflows and UI layouts into precise instructions that coding agents could implement cleanly without breaking existing logic.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Functional Feature Set: Almost every core feature—from real-time expense categorization to projection calculations—works reliably end-to-end.
Polished UI/UX: The dashboard is clean, intuitive, and distraction-free, making complex financial metrics straightforward and actionable for busy restaurateurs.
Effective Agent-Assisted Workflow: Mastered a collaborative development loop between teammates and AI coding tools under strict time constraints.

What we learned

Collaborative Software Engineering: How to coordinate Git branches, divide architectural responsibilities, and resolve conflicts cleanly in a high-pressure team setting.
System Specification: How to articulate complex software features with enough technical precision that both teammates and AI agents can execute without ambiguity.

What's next for EZ Money

Full Production Deployment: Transitioning from a hackathon prototype into a hosted, production-ready web application with user authentication and data persistence.
Cross-Industry Expansion: Generalizing the financial projection models so that other small businesses—such as cafes, retail boutiques, and local service providers—can manage their cash flow just as seamlessly.
Automated Data Ingestion: Integrating POS (Point of Sale) and banking APIs so owners can sync revenue and expenses automatically without manual data entry.