Helm

An AI COO for owners with more than one thing going on.

Source-available, not open source. This repository is published for reference and portfolio review only. © 2026 Arya Mehta. All rights reserved. No copying, reuse, modification, or redistribution without prior written permission. See LICENSE.

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Most small-business owners don't own just one thing. They own a franchise and a shop, or a couple of locations and a brokerage account. No tool speaks all of those at once — so the owner lives in five dashboards and a spreadsheet.

Helm puts every revenue source on one screen, normalizes them to the same yardstick (return on capital, contribution to net worth), and every morning tells you the one or two things worth your attention — and what to do about them. Think less "AI dashboard," more chief operating officer in your pocket.

What it does

• 🧭 Morning brief — a ranked feed of what changed and what to do, written in plain English ("Riverside is down 22% today — staffing looks light for a Friday"). Not charts you have to interpret; conclusions you can act on.
• 💰 One net worth — businesses and investments on a single capital yardstick, with cash on hand and a simple runway projection. Every figure converted to one display currency so the totals are honest (a Subway in Ontario rings up CAD; a shop in Ohio rings up USD).
• 🏪 Businesses — each business as a card: today's revenue vs. a typical day, week/month trends, average ticket, profit, and return on capital. Tap in for detail and peer benchmarks.
• 💬 Ask Helm — ask questions about your own numbers in natural language; answers come from your real metrics, never fabricated.
• ➕ Add anything — link a bank or brokerage (Plaid), pull daily sales from accounting software (TallyPrime), or upload a CSV/Z-report. Adding a new business is just adding one normalized config — the UI renders any of them.

How Helm uses Plaid

Helm uses Plaid so an owner can securely link their real bank and brokerage accounts and see actual balances and holdings alongside their businesses — instead of typing numbers by hand.

Plaid product	What Helm does with it
Investments (/investments/holdings/get)	Pulls real holdings (ticker, shares, cost basis, value) into the owner's portfolio so net worth reflects the market, not a stale spreadsheet.
Balances (/accounts/balance/get)	Reads available cash across depository accounts to show "idle cash" and a runway estimate on the net-worth screen.

Security model: the Plaid client_id and secret live only in server-side environment variables and are used only by the connector (server/connector.mjs). The browser never sees them. Link runs through Plaid Link; the resulting access_token is exchanged and stored server-side (server/.tokens.json, gitignored) — it never reaches the client. If the connector isn't running, the app degrades gracefully to manual CSV / public price data, so a link is never required to use Helm.

See PLAID_SETUP.md to run it (works in a no-keys demo mode out of the box, and flips to live Plaid Sandbox the moment keys are present), and PRIVACY.md for how account data is handled.

Privacy & security

• Account credentials are never entered into Helm — linking happens inside Plaid Link.
• Plaid secret and access tokens are server-side only; nothing sensitive is shipped to the browser.
• .env and link tokens are gitignored and never committed.
• Helm does not sell or share account data. Full detail in PRIVACY.md.

Tech

Vite · React 18 · TypeScript · Tailwind · Recharts · lucide-react, with a small Express connector for the server-side Plaid / TallyPrime calls. Ships as an installable PWA.

Getting started

npm install
npm run dev

Then open http://localhost:5173 — runs with bundled sample data, no setup needed.

Optional, to link real accounts:

cp .env.example .env # add your Plaid keys (Sandbox is free); see PLAID_SETUP.md
npm run dev          # the connector now talks to Plaid Sandbox

Architecture

Every revenue source — a restaurant, a retail shop, a brokerage account — is reduced to one normalized Business config (src/types.ts). The intelligence layer (src/lib/analytics.ts, src/lib/insights.ts) computes metrics and the ranked brief from those configs, so the same UI renders any business type and adding a new source is additive, not a rewrite.

src/
  data/        normalized business configs, layered loader (sample ← synced ← imported), overrides
  lib/         analytics, insights ("COO brain"), Plaid/Tally/quotes clients, currency, import
  components/  Brief · Net worth · Businesses · detail · editors · Ask
server/        Express connector — Plaid + TallyPrime (keys stay here, never in the browser)

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_{© 2026 Helm. All rights reserved. Prototype — figures shown on sample data are illustrative.}