Replacing $50k manual forensic audits with a deterministic .py engine
I’m a software architect, and I recently built Exit Protocol (https://exitprotocols.com), an automated forensic accounting engine for high-conflict litigation. Problem: If you get divorced and need to prove that a specific $250k in a heavily commingled joint bank account is your "separate property" (e.g., from a pre-marital startup exit), the burden of proof is strictly mathematical. Historically, this meant paying a forensic CPA $500/hour to dump years of blurry bank PDFs into Excel and manually trace every dollar. It takes weeks and routinely costs over $50,000. I looked at…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
I’m a software architect, and I recently built Exit Protocol (https://exitprotocols.com), an automated forensic accounting engine for high-conflict litigation. Problem: If you get divorced and need to prove that a specific $250k in a heavily commingled joint bank account is your "separate property" (e.g., from a pre-marital startup exit), the burden of proof is strictly mathematical. Historically, this meant paying a forensic CPA $500/hour to dump years of blurry bank PDFs into Excel and manually trace every dollar. It takes weeks and routinely costs over $50,000. I looked at the legal standard courts use for this—the Lowest Intermediate Balance Rule (LIBR)—and realized it wasn’t an accounting problem. It is a Distributed Systems state-machine problem. Why we didn't just "Throw AI at it"? There are a hundred legal-tech startups right now trying to use LLMs to summarize bank data. In a courtroom, GenAI is a fatal liability. If an LLM hallucinates a single transaction, the entire ledger is inadmissible under the Daubert standard. To make this court-ready, we had to build a strictly deterministic pipeline: 1. Vision-Native Ingestion (Beating Tesseract) Bank statements are the final boss of OCR (merged cells, overlapping debit/credit columns). Standard linear OCR fails catastrophically. We built a spatial-grid OCR pipeline (using Azure Document Intelligence with a local Surya OCR fallback) that maps the geometric structure of the page. It reconstructs tabular ledgers perfectly, even from multi-generational "PDFs from hell." 2. The Deterministic Engine (LIBR) The LIBR algorithm acts as a one-way ratchet. If an account balance drops below your separate property claim amount, your claim is permanently capped at that new floor. Subsequent marital deposits do not refill it (the "replenishment fallacy"). The engine replays thousands of transactions chronologically, continuously evaluating S_t = min(S_t-1, B_t). 3. Resolving Timestamp Ambiguity Bank PDFs give you dates, not timestamps. If a $10k deposit and $10k withdrawal happen on the same day, order matters. We built a simulation toggle that forces "Worst Case" (withdrawals process first) vs "Best Case" sorting, establishing a mathematically irrefutable "Zone of Truth" for settlement negotiations. 4. Cryptographic Chain of Custody & Sovereign Mode Lawyers are terrified of cloud SaaS breaches. We containerized the entire monolith (Django 5.0/Postgres/Celery) via Docker so enterprise firms can run it air-gapped on their own hardware (Sovereign Mode). Furthermore, every generated PDF dossier is sealed with a SHA-256 hash of the underlying data snapshot, proving to a judge that the output hasn't been tampered with since generation. If you want to see the math in action, we set up a "Demo Sandbox" populated with a synthetic, highly complex 3-year commingled ledger. You can run the engine yourself here (Desktop recommended): https://exitprotocols.com/simulation/uplink/ Here is the exact "Attorney Work Product" it generates from raw PDF or Forensic Audit Dossier our system generates- https://exitprotocols.com/static/documents/Forensic_Audit_Sa... I'd love feedback from the HN crowd on the architecture—specifically handling edge-case data ingestion and maintaining cryptographic integrity in B2B enterprise deployments. Cheers!
Does the same job
all alternatives →- IAI automated forensic accounting for divorce cases (3 min vs. 4 weeks)Dec 2025 · ▲6
Burned about 1 weeks on this. Not sure if it's useful to anyone beyond my original use case, but figure I'd share. Friend went through a nasty divorce. Had $750k going into the marriage (inheritance), put it in a joint account like an idiot. Five years later, account's been up and down, money mixed with paychecks and mortgage payments. Lawyer says "you need a forensic accountant to trace what's still yours." Quote comes back: $5k, 4 weeks minimum. I'm sitting there thinking - this is just transaction categorization and some relatively simple math (the "Lowest Intermediate Balance Rule" if…
Bank Statement Parsing & Fraud Detection2022 · ▲110Instantaneous bank statement PDF parsing and fraud detection
- LW"LawyerClock" - watch your cash burn during meetings2011 · lawyerclock.com · ▲18
Hey everyone. I'm a founder of a Boston based, venture backed startup, unrelated this this link. One of my business partners and I coded this website DURING long and painful meetings with our attorneys as a way to pass the time. We racked up over $100k in legal bills through a couple fundraising and legal hurdles. This is the website that resulted from that time.<p>We'd love your feedback for version 2.0. Thanks!
More commerce this month
the category →
Compare your startup equity grant for free.
Commerce · 26d ago · equitybee.com
Launched alongside, March 2026
the whole month →
Switch from ChatGPT to Claude with import memory feature
AI · Mar 2026 · claude.com
