Inspiration Shilingi was inspired by informal traders and small business owners who need a simple way to track cash flow without complex accounting tools. The goal was to make bookkeeping intuitive and accessible for users who prefer mobile-style simplicity and offline resilience.
What it does it records the transactions of incomes and expenses Shilingi records income and expense transactions, categorizes them, and shows a financial summary dashboard. It supports:
adding transactions manually voice entry for hands-free logging receipt scanning via OCR totals for income, expenses, profit/loss a visual health dashboard and charts syncing with a backend service
How we built itThe app combines:
a browser-based frontend: index.html, styles.css, app.js a Python/Flask backend: app.py SQLite storage for persistent transaction history browser APIs for voice recognition and local storage Chart.js for visual analytics We kept the architecture simple so the UI and backend stay tightly connected without unnecessary complexity.
Challenges we ran intogetting the Flask dependency pinned correctly
handling browser speech permission errors like not-allowed keeping the backend stable while auto-reload was enabled making deployment work cleanly on a host like Render
Accomplishments that we're proud ofbuilt a full frontend + backend MVP
added voice entry and receipt OCR support created a working financial dashboard with charts successfully pushed the project to GitHub prepared the app for Render deployment
What we learnedbrowser microphone permission is often the real blocker for voice features
Flask version pinning must match published PyPI releases Render deployment needs both requirements.txt and deployment config present keeping build/runtime configuration explicit avoids deployment surprises
What's next for shillingiadd user authentication and account separation
support cloud sync across devices improve receipt parsing accuracy and date extraction add recurring transactions and budget alerts build a mobile-friendly responsive layout for traders on the go
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