ExpenseIntel — AI Expense Intelligence Platform for SMB Corporate Cards.

Experience

Built at McGill’s first ever Claude Builder Club hackathon, and my second hackathon experience. This one spanned across 3 days, which fortunately meant no all-nighters. First time ever using Claude Code was life-changing for the better. Being able to plan alongside Claude for hours to then watch it build exactly what I asked for was very cool. On the actual day of the hackathon, I had a trial with Inter Montréal soccer club and went directly to the hackathon afterwards. This project also won the Brim Financial Sub-Challenge, which was nice to experience winning for the first time.

Motivation

I remember seeing the Instagram post and thought why not apply and see what I can build in only 8 hours. However, later on they allowed teams to start working up to 3 days earlier, which prompted my team and me to get a head start, especially considering I would miss the morning with my soccer trial. The objective was to win the Brim Sub-challenge from the beginning as we were disappointed in not winning anything from the last one we participated in.

Learned

Beyond learning about all the capabilities of Claude Code, I learned how to integrate Claude API into real features and how to place specific guardrails to ensure effective token usage and quality reasoning. The restriction of API credits was a huge limiting factor, but it forced me to think critically about how to be efficient with the API call instructions.