PaperTrail: Your Private Financial Co-Pilot Powered by Open-Weight AI 💸

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle Submission 💸

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle

PaperTrail — Your Private Financial Co-Pilot 💸

PaperTrail is a privacy-first financial document manager designed for freelancers, solopreneurs, and independent creators.

It uses open-weight multimodal AI to extract information from invoices and receipts, while a deterministic audit engine checks arithmetic discrepancies before records are exported.

PaperTrail helps freelancers spend less time on bookkeeping and more time growing their businesses.

Live Demo: https://paper-trail-2pk6.vercel.app

Explore the General Ledger, Variance Resolution Desk, Tax Intelligence Engine, AI Benchmark Studio, and offline capabilities.

GitHub Repository: https://github.com/ziyadparkar01/Paper-Trail

Tech Stack: React 19, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind CSS, Dexie.js, IndexedDB, Python FastAPI, and SQLite.

PaperTrail combines open-weight AI with deterministic financial verification.

The key design decision is separating AI extraction from financial verification: AI interprets documents, while deterministic code checks the arithmetic.

Financial documents contain sensitive information, including client billing rates, bank details, and tax identifiers.

Open-weight AI makes local inference and greater control over document processing possible without depending entirely on closed cloud AI APIs.

It also enables developers to customize extraction workflows for regional invoice formats, reduce recurring inference costs, and build more transparent financial tools.

The goal: your financial data, your rules, your control.

Built using the AI Studio engineering environment, with a focus on: