Reclaim — Our Project Story

What Inspired Us

Reclaim was inspired by a problem we realized many small businesses face: money can quietly be lost through mistakes in their financial processes. An invoice could be entered twice, a price could be recorded incorrectly, or a payment could be made for something that does not match the original invoice. These problems may seem small individually, but they can add up over time.

We wanted to build something that could help small businesses find these financial leaks before they became bigger problems. Our goal was to create a tool that could compare financial records, identify suspicious inconsistencies, and give business owners clear evidence of what went wrong.

What We Learned

While building Reclaim, we learned that creating a useful software product is about much more than writing code. We had to understand the actual problem businesses experience and design our solution around it. We learned how important it is for financial software to be accurate, explainable, and easy for a business owner to understand.

We also learned about working with structured financial data, comparing records, designing a user-friendly interface, and connecting different parts of a software system together. Most importantly, we learned how to take feedback from real people and use it to improve our idea.

How We Built Reclaim

We built Reclaim as a tool that analyzes financial information and looks for discrepancies that could represent money lost by a business. The system compares information such as invoices, amounts, and payment records and identifies potential problems. Instead of simply giving the user a result, Reclaim is designed to provide evidence explaining why something was flagged.

We also focused on making the interface simple enough for a small business owner to use without needing to understand complicated financial software. Throughout development, we tested the application, fixed problems, refined the interface, and continued improving the system based on feedback.

Challenges We Faced

One of our biggest challenges was figuring out how to turn a broad financial problem into a specific, useful product. There are many different ways a business can lose money, so we had to determine which problems Reclaim could realistically identify and solve.

We also faced technical challenges while building and testing the application. Making sure that records were compared correctly was especially important because financial decisions require accuracy. We had to debug errors, improve our logic, and make the results understandable to the user.

Another challenge was learning how to think beyond the project itself. We had to consider how Reclaim could actually be used by real small businesses, how we could demonstrate its value, and how the product could grow in the future.

What Reclaim Means to Us

Reclaim started as an idea for a hackathon, but it became much more than that. Winning the Global Association of AI Hackathon showed us that the problem we were solving had real potential. Since then, we have continued developing Reclaim, getting feedback, and thinking about how we can turn it into a product that can make a real difference for small businesses.

Through Reclaim, we learned how to identify a real-world problem, build a technical solution, listen to feedback, and keep improving an idea even after the initial competition is over.