A full room. More than 50 builds. A day spent tackling the problems finance teams know first-hand.
On 7 October, Light and Lovable joined Everphone in Berlin for the next stop on our global Finance Hackathon tour. The brief was familiar: bring a finance headache, open your laptop and build something to help solve it.
By the end of the day, there were more than 50 builds. Invoice matching, investor requests and cash runway were among the problems people took on. The ideas came from work they understood, with all its awkward handovers, missing information and repeated checks.
The finalists
Three finalists showed how much ground finance builders can cover in a day. Each prototype started with a different problem.
AssetFlow Agent
Buying phones and cameras for a rental business sets off a chain of accounting work. An invoice needs to match a purchase order. A down payment needs to be cleared. When the devices reach the warehouse, they need to become assets on the books.
AssetFlow Agent brought that chain into one workflow. It reads invoices, matches them to purchase orders and down payments, and clears the clean matches automatically. Exceptions go to finance with the reason attached.
One example in the demo made the distinction clear: an invoice and its down payment differed by €500. The app flagged the gap and put the supporting documents and processing history alongside it, giving the reviewer somewhere useful to start.
The workflow continues when the warehouse receives the devices, with checks on quantities, prices and serial numbers before capitalisation. A CFO overview brings together spend against budget, the asset fleet and outstanding commitments. The build connected the details of an individual purchase to the bigger picture of where the money was going.
IR Desk
IR Desk tackled investor relations for a crypto company with around 10,000 investors. At that scale, a question rarely arrives with every detail finance needs to answer it.
The prototype interviews the investor in their own language, asking for the purpose, period, currency and format of the request. It turns that conversation into a structured brief and a draft report for finance, flagging gaps for review before anything is released.
The wider idea is to meet investors where they already ask questions: WhatsApp, Telegram, email or ChatGPT. The useful step demonstrated in the build was turning an open-ended request into something the finance team could work with, while keeping a person responsible for the answer.
Cash runway
The third finalist focused on cash runway: how long the business can keep going with the money it has, and what might change that answer.
It is a question that brings cash on hand, incoming payments and planned spending together. A late customer payment or a change in hiring plans can move the picture quickly. The opportunity for a focused app is to make those assumptions easier to explore, so finance can spend more time discussing the decisions behind the number.
And the winner is… AssetFlow Agent
AssetFlow Agent took the win in Berlin. Its scope reached from the invoice arriving to the device entering the asset register, with a view of the spending for the CFO.
That made it a strong example of what these days can produce: a prototype shaped around a recognisable finance process, with the routine work moving automatically and the exceptions clearly surfaced for a person to review.
A global community of finance builders
We run these hackathons because we are building a global community of new wave finance leaders. People who don't just report, but build.
Berlin brought that idea into a full room. People arrived with problems from their own working days and left with something they could show, test and keep improving. More than 50 builds is a lot of starting points for better ways of working.
Want to join the next one? Explore the Finance Hackathon tour and follow Light on LinkedIn for future dates.
