PayPilot — AI-Powered Payment Operations for Small Businesses
Tagline: Simplifying payment tracking and business insights with AI.
Inspiration
Small businesses often manage orders and payment statuses across spreadsheets, messages, and multiple platforms. This makes it difficult to track transactions, identify pending payments, and understand business activity.
We wanted to build a simple tool that brings order management, payment tracking, and AI-assisted insights together.
What it does
PayPilot is an AI-powered payment operations assistant designed to help small businesses organize order records, test payment workflows, and understand their business activity.
The prototype combines a business dashboard, a PayPal Sandbox checkout integration, payment history, and an AI assistant.
Key features
- Business Dashboard: View sample business metrics and order records.
- Order Management: Add orders and update their statuses.
- PayPal Sandbox Checkout: Create a test payment, approve it through PayPal Sandbox, and capture the approved payment.
- Payment History: Store and display payment IDs, amounts, timestamps, and transaction statuses.
- AI Business Assistant: Ask questions about order activity and payment records, and receive AI-generated summaries.
- Secure Server-Side Integration: PayPal credentials remain on the backend and are not exposed in browser code.
How we built it
PayPilot was built using Python, Flask, SQLite, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
We integrated the PayPal Orders API v2 in Sandbox mode to demonstrate the payment creation, approval, and capture lifecycle. The AI assistant uses the Groq API to provide business summaries and insights.
Challenges we faced
One of the main challenges was connecting the PayPal checkout lifecycle to our own application. We had to handle server-side authentication, order creation, buyer approval, payment capture, and transaction persistence.
We also focused on making the demo transparent by distinguishing simulated Sandbox transactions from real business revenue.
What's next
Future improvements include live payment support, verified PayPal webhooks, stronger user authentication, persistent production-grade storage, and more advanced AI-powered financial insights.
Important prototype limitations
PayPilot currently demonstrates PayPal Sandbox transactions only. It does not process real payments. Dashboard order records are fictional sample data, and the AI assistant provides analysis rather than executing transactions.
Project
Name: PayPilot
Team: NexoraForge AI
Type: Solo project
Live Demo: https://paypilot-xfcb.onrender.com
GitHub: https://github.com/feresdouik/paypilot
