Jessie

Inspiration

One of our group mates, being an accounting undergraduate, have came across many complaints from people in the industry about how tough the work is, and how long the working hours are, especially during the peak periods. The bulk of their time is spent doing vouching which tends to be repetitive and manual. The stakes, however, are high on auditors when fraud or misstatements go undetected. We want to enhance the audit process for these professionals, and increase their job fulfillment, while reducing the risks for these auditors. Also, the rapid changes in technology makes it hard for auditors to keep up. Hence, we want to create an app that is user friendly, and bridge the gap between them and technology.

What it does

Jessie is a personal audit assistant that removes technological barriers to get you answers. Jessie implements state-of-the-art technologies such as Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning to enhance the work process of accountants, reduce time spent on repetitive and mundane task, and provide a forward-looking view for auditors, and their clients.

How we built it

Blockchain Network - We created a Chaincode container using Hyperledger Composer to simulate a blockchain environment. Jessie is designed not only for the present but the future of auditing when blockchain becomes the standard and Jessie can securely access and retrieve data for verification.

Machine Learning - We created a Multiclass SVM model for Jessie to input information from several sources and predict a Risk Factor Score.

Jessie - We created Jessie on DialogFlow and used a webhook to integrate with different sources and API. Jessie is smart and equipped with Natural Language Processing and Cognitive Capabilities. We integrated Jessie with Cloud Natural Language API to understand the content of news articles, Cloud ML engine with our custom model for Jessie to evaluate the sources and predict a Risk Factor Score.

Challenges we ran into

We had to put ourselves in the shoes of the auditors, and think through the entire process, from the start to the end, which is not easy since every engagement is unique. Also, much research and talking to people in the industry was needed to understand how they feel, and which areas they feel the most strongly about which we could help them using technology.

As for the technology aspect, we wanted to integrate the latest technologies into Jessie. However, we had to first understand how they work and how to apply them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Surprisingly, we were able to integrate different technologies into one interface, Jessie. As we had no experience with blockchain, we were really happy that we managed to create a playground environment.

What we learned

Auditing is definitely not an easy task and the challenges they faced are overwhelming. We also learnt how to implement modern technologies to solve the struggles of accountants. Also, teamwork is extremely important in order to turn ideas into reality.

What's next for Jessie

We would like to test out Jessie in a actual corporate environment to finetune the algorithms and software. We believe that Jessie will disrupt the audit industry to not only improve the efficiency as well as quality of assessment, while freeing up more time for auditors to upgrade themselves.

Built With

• dialogflow
• hyperledger-composer
• node.js
• sentiment-analysis