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Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

driggsby.com

21–30 of 141 posts

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#22
post #20

I recently did this for myself using https://tiller.com/ to sync checking/credit-card transactions to a Google Sheets spreadsheet. Then a GitHub action mirrors the spreadsheet to a free Supabase database. From there, Supabase MCP or psql gives Claude/Codex access to the transactions/balances for english queries. Really impressed with their ability to find subscription patterns, abnormal patterns, etc. Also to predict…

That's so cool! Are you planning to open source any of this? Would love to see how you set everything up, or - maybe most interested in - some of your prompts.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#24
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reached out to them a couple years ago with this exact question and was told flat-out no. You might be able to sneak around it with an LLC but I think they also require you to have a public website for a plausibly banking-related business, which altogether seemed like too much effort to fake for what I wanted out of it.

So you don't have to be a business to use Plaid, but you do have to be a business to buy Plaid via the Sales channel rather than via the self-serve channel. Admittedly, when folks reach out to Sales and ask to buy Plaid and are told they're not eligible because they're not a business, this nuance is sometimes not communicated very well (or at all). We're working on it. :-) In fact, we actually just this week launched…

Thank you for the info! Is this a somewhat recent change or has it always been this way? "A couple years ago" in my comment was doing some heavy lifting, I probably reached out around 2017ish.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#25
This seems like a solution looking for a problem. https://tiller.com/ works great and lets you do whatever calculations you want in a spreadsheet - and, bonus, it's never going to hallucinate.

I don't quite understand the desire to have these verbose summaries that you have to read from LLMs. You'll notice anomalies if you just categorize each of your expenses every so often (easy with Tiller).

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#26
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you don't have to be a business to use Plaid, but you do have to be a business to buy Plaid via the Sales channel rather than via the self-serve channel. Admittedly, when folks reach out to Sales and ask to buy Plaid and are told they're not eligible because they're not a business, this nuance is sometimes not communicated very well (or at all). We're working on it. :-) In fact, we actually just this week launched…

Thank you for the info! Is this a somewhat recent change or has it always been this way? "A couple years ago" in my comment was doing some heavy lifting, I probably reached out around 2017ish.

It must be very very new, since we weren't offered it a couple months ago!

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#27

This seems like a solution looking for a problem. https://tiller.com/ works great and lets you do whatever calculations you want in a spreadsheet - and, bonus, it's never going to hallucinate. I don't quite understand the desire to have these verbose summaries that you have to read from LLMs. You'll notice anomalies if you just categorize each of your expenses every so often (easy with Tiller).

Hi! Thanks for sharing.

I actually built it for myself initially, and my wife. So I just built what we needed/wanted.

There will be a huge variety of products in this space and ours is just one take on the problem. I love seeing anything that's taking a shot at it.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#30
post #2

I'm curious how reasonable it would be for a person, rather than a company, to have a plaid sub.

There’s also this: https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/ . Very reasonably priced and it works great. Actual Budget uses it.

Could you share more about how it works?
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