this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2025
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I’m not necessarily interested in the traditional full budgeting and planning type stuff, but more like “AI take all these statements and tell me how to save money” purpose built tools. Anyone used anything they’d suggest?

(And to hopefully head off any unhelpful answers like I got on Reddit, I am not trying to have an AI manage my money, nor am I talking about just a wrapper for ChatGPT. AI in the broad sense of the term that can be intelligently used as part of larger programmatic workflows.)

Edit: For anyone actually trying to understand the possible applications, I found this: https://midday.ai/updates/automatic-reconciliation-engine/. The product is overkill for the sort of personal use I was asking about, but this article does a good job of showing the why and how.

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[–] aksdb@lemmy.world 11 points 4 days ago (6 children)

Where I could see an LLM being useful is categorizing entries and maybe proposing sanitization (for example when the payment provider uppercases or abbreviates stuff)

[–] chazwhiz@lemmy.world 7 points 4 days ago (4 children)

Yep, that’s exactly the sort of thing I’m thinking about here. And it doesn’t even need to be full on chat style LLM, just some decent NLP that can recognize WALMART, WAL-MART, or WMART are all the same thing and label it.

But for some reason this question brings out all the assumption people who want to give financial advice or talk about the AI image the saw last year with 6 fingers.

[–] Mordikan@kbin.earth 0 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Honestly, you don't even need NLP for this. Excel supports regex now so you could just do a call like =REGEXTEST(A1, "(?!)^w.*mart$"). Then just mark by type and graph out to see where your main spending is coming from.

[–] chazwhiz@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

You’re missing the point, that would require sitting down and manually doing that for every conceivable payee. Walmart is just an example. The value of any sort of “intelligent” component would be for this to happen automatically and seamlessly for the user. Hell, the AI layer could just be “write regex for al the possible similar payees across these documents”.

[–] Mordikan@kbin.earth -3 points 3 days ago

that would require sitting down and manually doing that for every conceivable payee

That's just called VLOOKUP(). I think you're over-complicating this process. If you sit down and look at your finances, you'll notice that the number of payees you have isn't some absurd unmanageable amount. As others have mentioned, there's no real use case for involving AI this way. There's no scale, no real benefit to financial tracking, etc. I get this is just to use AI for the sake of using AI, but that's not really a goal when writing financial software.

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