Freelancer DCAA-Compliant Receipt Chain-of-Custody Vault

HN 'Ask HN: What do you still do manually in 2026' thread — recurring theme: expense-report reconciliation and invoice-line matching for independent consultants.

7M+ US and 12M+ EU independent consultants juggle receipts across multiple clients. At tax/audit time, 4-8 hours per quarter sorting which receipt maps to which project.

Naive AI OCR receipt auto-categorizer is G005 death. Expensify, Ramp, Brex, Fyle all ship this.

Verb Transplant: transplanted 'chain of custody' from legal evidence handling into consultant expense records — timestamped location capture at purchase, biometric signing, project-context capture from calendar. Court-admissible receipt proof.

WHAT CHECK: WHO splits between casual consultants (no audit exposure, won't pay for forensic proof) and 50K niche forensic/litigation/gov-contractor consultants (real exposure). Market is where the pain isn't; pain is where the market isn't.

Sharpened to US government sub-contractor solo consultants (100K+) subject to DCAA audits — annual, high-stakes compliance event. Unanet and Deltek serve enterprise, not solo subs.

G149 fires: DCAA requires 'reasonable substantiation,' not forensic-grade proof. The imagination engine produced a solution more sophisticated than the buyer's actual need. Solo sub-contractors want $20/month Expensify-equivalent, not $80/month forensic vault.