Spendora - Nova Pay

Split a bill in plain English and collect with PayPal. Nova, Spendora's AI assistant, works out who owes what, creates PayPal payment requests, and records your share as an expense.

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Inspiration

Splitting a bill with friends is awkward: someone does the math, then everyone chases each other for money. Spendora is my AI finance assistant for campus life, so I asked what would happen if its assistant, Nova, could not only track spending but also collect money.

What it does

Nova Pay turns a plain-English sentence into real payment requests.

Type: "split the $60 dinner with Rahul and Priya", and Nova:

  1. Works out the total, the names and who owes what ($20 each)
  2. Creates a separate PayPal payment request for each friend
  3. Saves your own share as an expense, categorized automatically by AI
  4. Captures each payment when the friend approves it on PayPal and shows a confirmation

How I built it

  • Frontend: React, TypeScript, Vite and Tailwind. Nova Pay is a new "Pay" tab in the existing Spendora app.
  • AI: A Groq-hosted model reads the sentence and returns only the total, description and names. The split math is done in code, in cents, so the shares always add up exactly. I deliberately don't let the AI do arithmetic.
  • PayPal: Vercel serverless functions call the PayPal Orders v2 API to create and capture orders. The PayPal credentials stay on the server and are never sent to the browser.
  • Data: Supabase (PostgreSQL) stores users and expenses.

Challenges I ran into

  • My first PayPal sandbox accounts were set to India, which rejected USD payments. I created US sandbox accounts and a new app to fix it.
  • PayPal's sandbox sometimes rejected one of two simultaneous order requests, so the app now creates orders one at a time and retries up to three times.
  • A failed attempt used to save an expense even when a payment link failed. The expense is now saved only when every link is created.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

A complete flow that works end to end on a live deployment: sentence, split, PayPal checkout, capture, and a recorded expense.

What I learned

How the PayPal Orders API works (create, approve, capture), how to keep secrets on the server, and why AI should extract information while code does the math.

What's next

Saving each request in the database so every friend shows as Pending or Paid, receiving payments through PayPal webhooks, and supporting more currencies.

How to test

Open the live demo, log in with the demo account below, and open the Pay tab. Type split the $60 dinner with Rahul and Priya, click Ask Nova, then Create PayPal payment requests. Click Pay next to a name and log in on PayPal with the sandbox buyer account below. This is the PayPal sandbox, so no real money moves.

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