Inspiration

Small business owners make huge calls on gut feel. Can I hire someone? Can I pay myself this month? The answer is usually sitting in QuickBooks, but nobody wants to dig through it. A part-time CFO could tell them, but most small businesses can't afford one. We wanted something you could just ask.

What it does

You ask Tally a question on ASI:One, like "can I hire two people next quarter?" It reads your books, plays out the next 13 weeks, and gives you a straight answer that still holds if customers pay late. When a supplier keeps raising prices, Tally can negotiate with them for you, but it never agrees to anything without your OK.

We would sell Tally to individual businesses as a QuickBooks add-on, so any owner can get CFO-level advice for the price of a subscription.

How we built it

Fetch.ai agents on Agentverse handle the chat. A Next.js app on Vercel does the math. Gemini reads the question but never touches the numbers. The negotiator plans moves ahead and keeps guessing the supplier's lowest price. It all runs on Intuit's dataset of 100 synthetic companies.

A plan only counts as safe if cash stays above the owner's reserve every week, and above zero even when every customer pays 30 days late:

$$\text{cash}_w \ge \text{reserve} \quad \text{and} \quad \text{cash}^{\text{late}}_w \ge 0 \quad \text{for every week } w$$

Challenges we ran into

Agentverse kept rejecting our agent, and it took a while to figure out the description was too long. Gemini also liked to make up numbers, so we built a check that throws those answers out. When we let an LLM negotiate, it caved almost right away.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Tally's numbers match the dataset's own reports exactly for all 100 companies. Our negotiator saved 9.2% on average, while an LLM only saved 3.3%.

What we learned

AI is great at understanding people and bad at math. Splitting those jobs made everything more reliable.

What's next for Tally

We want to connect real QuickBooks accounts and try the real System One model. After that, the negotiator should be able to email suppliers once the owner approves.