I wish financial institutions were better at automated exports of your financial data, given the right permissions of course.
In practice, though, I found them less useful for budgeting than expected. A bank statement tells you how much was spent and where, but not what the expense actually was. “$100 at a supermarket” could be groceries, pet food, a lawn mower, or business expenses — that context is what makes budgeting meaningful, and it usually has to be added manually anyway.
At that point, entering the expense directly with the right category often turned out to be simpler and more accurate for me. Automated access would still be nice for reconciliation, but it’s not the silver bullet it’s often perceived to be.
You're right that "$100 at a supermarket" is useless but I found even knowing "I spent $400 on groceries" wasn't that useful either. I kept asking myself "okay, but on what?"
So I leaned hard into making categories the starting point instead of the endpoint. Groceries breaks down into what I'm actually buying. Turns out I was spending way more on coffee than I realized.
Did you ever consider going deeper into categories, or do you find users just want the high level view? I've been torn on how much detail is actually helpful vs. overwhelming.
The key limitation is that a raw bank transaction usually contains very little semantic information: amount, merchant name, date. From that alone, an LLM can only guess based on patterns or prior behavior, not actually know what the expense was for.
“$100 at a supermarket” could be groceries, pet food, a household item, or something work-related. An LLM can infer probabilities once it has enough historical data and feedback, but that still means the user has to correct or confirm things at some point.
So I see LLMs as very helpful for assisting categorization (suggestions, defaults, learning over time), but they can’t fully replace intent unless the underlying data becomes richer than what bank statements provide today.
Why do we need such a detailed breakdown for personal finance. I am pondering on this idea of using under or over type prompts to capture daily expense. The app send a notification asking me did you spend $100 or less in the day. Eventual goal of all budgeting apps is to reduce spending. this simple prompt can capture immense information without needing to break it down. breaking it down to categories can be a step if there is a problem detected in the savings pattern. For that banks are already adding the feature
keen to hear thoughts on this