Ai Accountant

Inspiration

I worked as an accountant for many years, and realized along the way that accounting absolutely sucks. And accounting sucks especially for Small Businesses. As a small business owner, you have three options when it comes to accounting:

Spend thousands of dollars hiring an accountant.
Spend hundreds of hours on accounting yourself.
Get fined by the IRS. None of these options are great, so we decided to build Ai Accountant

What it does

After connecting your bank account, transactions flow into our classification model for bookkeeping. Once the transactions have been properly classified, then a custom budget is made based off your industry and your bank account history. You can view charts such as your net income, cash flow, budget v actuals, etc. You can also use a tax ai model to find tax deductions for tax season for your business. And there's an AI Assistant that essentially acts as your CFO, answering all your questions about your company.

How we built it

We used NextJS for the full stack dev, google auth for the authentication of users, fine tuned openAI models and vector embeddings for the classification and ai assistant to ensure the accuracy of the LLMs, AWS RDS for data storage, Prisma as the ORM, and Plaid for establishing the bank connection.

Challenges we ran into

One of the largest challenges was figuring out the accounting infrastructure. It turns out that it's harder than it seems! We essentially had to recreate the backend logic of multi-billion dollar accounting software like Intuit Quickbooks, which have hundreds of millions of lines of code!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the product out, and figuring out a good UI/UX design for the AI Assistant. Figuring out how to break down different companies into different tax writeoff brackets.