SETTLE — Hackathon Submission

PROJECT IDEA

Problem Statement

Staff and students submit payout requests (stipends, reimbursements, experiment funds) through fragmented channels—chat, email, spreadsheets. There is no shared record of what was approved, paid, or declined. Finance teams manually reconstruct approval chains from conversation history, leading to lost requests, duplicate approvals, no audit trail, and requester confusion about status.

Solution

Settle is a multi-tenant SaaS platform that replaces fragmented processes with one system of record:

• For Staff: Submit requests with receipts (OCR extracts amount/date/merchant) and track real-time status
• For Finance: Dashboard to approve/reject requests with full context; record payments; handle failures
• For Admins: Manage org settings, invite users, control who can submit/approve
• Compliance: Immutable audit trail of every approval, rejection, and payment

Key Differentiator: Auto-escalation—requests pending 7+ days surface on dashboard (no buried requests).

Team

• 2 Frontend Developers (Next.js, React)
• 2 Backend Developers (Go, PostgreSQL)
• Architecture: Vertical feature slicing (minimal merge conflicts)

MVP Scope (12 Days)

✅ Request submission + status tracking
✅ Finance approval workflow (approve/reject/mark paid)
✅ Organization setup + user invitations
✅ Receipt upload + OCR
✅ Comments/discussion threads
✅ Audit log + request escalation
✅ Multi-tenant isolation

❌ Stripe payments, email notifications, multiple approval levels (v2+)

Why It Matters

Solves real pain: organizations with staff needing reimbursements waste time with manual processes. Settle brings clarity—one platform, complete audit trail, faster approvals.

Timeline: 12-day sprint → Production-ready MVP → Post-launch: Scale to multiple customers.