Palapa

Inspiration

Corner stores (bodegas) in New York run on cash and a paper notebook: sales, deliveries, and fiado, the store credit owners give neighbors who pay later. Owners can't type while serving customers, fiado gets lost, stock runs out unnoticed, and without records there is no proof of income for a loan or a lease. In the US, 9.5% of Hispanic households have no bank account, compared with 1.9% of White households (FDIC, 2023).

What it does

Palapa is a cash register you talk to. The owner says or types what happened, in Spanish, English or both ("Vendí tres aguas a dos dólares"). Palapa shows a receipt, "¿Así fue?", with what it understood and what will change. After "Sí, anótalo", cash, stock, fiado and sales tax update together.

•⁠ ⁠Home: total sales, sales tax and net; what was sold on credit; inventory alerts; today's ledger with undo. •⁠ ⁠Fiado: who owes what, their history, and recording payments. •⁠ ⁠Inventory: nine corner-store brands, the words the voice understands, low stock first, a taxable switch per product. •⁠ ⁠Trámites: the tax forms, registrations, licenses and deadlines for each type of business, from 31 official IRS, New York State and New York City items, with deadlines that update as you answer. •⁠ ⁠Finanzas: a self-reported monthly statement a lender can review, in Spanish or English, as PDF or Excel. •⁠ ⁠Nine languages, including Arabic right to left.

How we built it

Base44 for the app, data and backend functions. ElevenLabs Scribe for speech-to-text and voice replies, with the browser's speech as a backup. The AI only turns a sentence into fields (product, quantity, price, customer). Plain code checks them and calculates every dollar from an append-only log: entries are never edited, undo marks a line as undone, and each entry keeps its price, cost and tax. Sales tax is tax-included and set by the business location (NYC 8.875% by default). Each browser gets its own demo store.

Challenges we ran into

Keeping the AI away from arithmetic, a crash on sentences with two products, and reliable voice when the speech service was unavailable. Getting the report math right: we checked the September numbers by hand to the cent.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A receipt-style confirmation an older shop owner can read at the counter, a lender statement whose numbers match a hand calculation ($258.00 sales, $248.50 collected, $13.84 tax), and a compliance guide built only from official sources checked against 2026 rules.

What we learned

Separate understanding language from counting money. Design for busy hands: big type, voice first, one clear confirmation. Be honest about credit: the statement is self-reported until a lender validates it.

What's next for Palapa

A pilot with one bodega owner, validating the statement with a credit union or CDFI, text alerts for low stock and fiado through Twilio, WhatsApp voice notes, supplier reorders and private accounts.