Money.

I cannot keep up with my bank statements.

Too many bank accounts. Too many transactions.

So I need AI to help me without compromising my accounts.

I don’t trust agents buying things for me, or connecting my bank accounts to any AI. This newsletter is not about connecting your banks to AI.

I want to keep the control. So I found a better way to do it: go to your bank accounts, download the transaction csv. files, put them in a folder, give the folder to Claude, make it analyze it like a CFO, find the problem, and fix it.

This newsletter is my conclusion in simple steps to follow.

Oh, and I forgot: I ended up saving $10,200/year for my business. It works.

Step 1: Do not connect your banks.

I don’t trust connecting Claude/ChatGPT or anything else to my banks.

Instead, go to your bank accounts → transactions → export as a csv. (ideally over 12 months so you can catch your annual subscriptions you should cancel).

Then you create a folder on your computer with [NAME BANK-PRO or PERSO], for example, AIRWALLEX-PRO or REVOLUT-PERSO.

I won’t show my bank accounts to my 1,000,000 email subscribers (🫠), so I made fake folders to test it and take screenshots for you.

Step 2: Paste this into Claude.

This works with Claude, or any other AI.

I would suggest Claude or ChatGPT, though. More suited for the job. Their free plan is enough. Here’s how I did it with Claude, but you can swap with any AI.

I uploaded my folder:

Then paste this (long) prompt:

Be my CFO.

Goal: find every place I lose money, and tell me exactly what to cut, keep, switch or renegotiate, biggest money first.

Context: I attached the transaction exports (CSV) of every bank account and card I use. Each bank uses a different format, currency and date range. Some accounts may be for my business.

Work in 5 steps. Use code for every number: never estimate a total by reading.

STEP 1. Clean

• Read every file. For each one, tell me: bank, account, currency, first and last date, number of transactions.
• Put everything in one table: date, account, merchant (cleaned: “SQ *JOES COFFEE 4421” becomes “Joe’s Coffee”), amount, currency.
• Find the money that only moves between my own accounts: transfers, savings, paying my card bill, currency conversions, refunds. Take it out of spending, so nothing counts twice. If I pay a card you don’t have the file for, tell me.
• Group charges billed through Apple, Google, PayPal, Amazon or any other middleman by amount and day of the month, so each hidden subscription shows on its own line.

STEP 2. First look
Show me, for the whole period and per month: money in, money out, what’s left. Then my cost centers (housing, food, transport, software, subscriptions, insurance, fees, travel, business…) from biggest to smallest, and every recurring charge (weekly, monthly, yearly) with its price and when it renews next.

STEP 3. Ask me
Stop here and ask me 5 to 10 questions, with clickable options when you can. Only ask what changes your advice: where I live, my job, who I pay for, which accounts are business, what I’m saving for, and what each charge you can’t name is. Wait for my answers.

STEP 4. The audit, cost center by cost center, biggest first
For each cost center:

• What I spend per month and per year, and whether it’s going up.
• What’s normal for someone like me (my job, my country, my household), and how you know.
• Every merchant inside it, scored: KEEP, WATCH or CUT, with one line why.
• What I’d save per year if I act.
  Then hunt for:
• Ghost subscriptions: things I pay for and probably forgot. Ask me if you’re not sure.
• Odd charges: the same charge twice, a price that went up, a free trial that turned paid, a charge after I cancelled, tiny test charges, merchants you can’t identify.
• Fees: bank, card, ATM, currency conversion, late fees, interest.
• Business, if I have one: personal spending on business accounts (and the reverse), software seats I pay for twice or don’t use, which provider charges me the most to move or convert money, and a list of expenses to show my accountant.

STEP 5. Re-shop and act

• For every bill that renews (phone, internet, insurance, energy, software, memberships): search the web for today’s price of the same thing in my country, and give me the 2 or 3 best offers with the price, the link and the date you checked.
• For every CUT and every switch: write what I send or say. The cancel email, the switch steps, the call script to ask my current provider for a better price.
• End with my action list: one line per action, the yearly savings, the time it takes, sorted by money saved. Then the total.

Last, build me one page I can come back to: my numbers, my cost centers, my recurring charges, and the action list with checkboxes.

Rules:

• Every number comes from my files or from a source you link. If it’s an estimate, say so.
• When something needs a tax advisor or a lawyer, say it in one line and move on.
• Never ask me for a password or an account number.

Once done, this is what will happen:

If you want to see the entire artifact and how useful it is, go to this link: claude.ai/artifact.And do not worry, it’s fake data.

I did it on my own finances, though. And Claude saved me $10,200 by reducing a 2% Stripe fee to 1%.

I even asked it to write the necessary emails (using my Gmail, as a draft) after first finding the email to send it to:

On average, people pay $2-300 a year of “ghost subscriptions”; it’s a subscription you simply forgot to cancel. That’s why I built this one-time Claude audit.

But you will want to keep this chat and pin it:

Once done, let’s make it a CFO you update every month.

Step 3: Update it.

I wrote a prompt to turn it into a fintech app:

To get this result, you need to follow up with this prompt:

Turn my audit into a month-by-month money app I can come back to.

Goal: one page that looks and feels like a banking app (think Revolut, Monzo or Mercury). I tap a month and see how my money moved. Every month, I’ll add my new bank exports to this chat to watch it change.

What’s on it:

• Opens on the latest full month. A month that isn’t over says “so far”.
• At the top, one row to switch months: arrows on each side, the months in between. It scrolls sideways, it never wraps to a second line. Plus “All months”.
• One big number: what’s left this month. Next to it, smaller: money in and money out. Each with a small pill: up or down vs last month.
• Under it, a bar chart of money out for the last 12 months. Tapping a bar opens that month.
• My cost centers, biggest first, as rows like a bank app: a round icon with the first letter, the name, the amount on the right, the change vs last month as a small pill.
• Recurring charges: new this month, went up, stopped. Each row shows the next charge date and the cost per year.
• My cuts: did each one stop charging this month? Yes, no, or too early to tell.

Design:

• One clean sans-serif font. No serif. Numbers line up (tabular figures).
• Light grey background, white cards with rounded corners and a soft shadow, lots of space.
• Grey and black for everything. Green only for money saved, red only for money lost. One accent color for the selected month, nothing else.
• No sentence as a title, no instructions on the page. Just a small “Updated [date]” line.
• Built for my phone first. It works in dark mode too.
• Numbers count up when a month opens. Switching months fades, never flashes.
• Keep every number from the audit. Use code for every total.

Every month, when I add new exports and say “Add [month]”, update this same page: add the month, keep every past month, count rows I already gave you only once, and tell me in 3 lines what changed.

If you need more, ask me questions.

That’s it. Now you simply have to go back to this chat once a month, download your bank statements (transactions), upload them to your folder, and ask for an update. It looks like this:

Step 4: Claude drafts the savings.

Alright. A little recap so far:

• You know where your money goes.
• You found your ghost subscriptions.
• You have a money app that updates every month.

But finding the money doesn’t save it. You still have to write to Stripe, to Comcast, to Adobe, and to 17 others. Find the right address. Ask for the right number. Follow up.

My $10,200 came from one email. Claude found who to write to, wrote it, and drafted it in my Gmail. I pressed Send.

Actually, Claude drafted not one email but 21 to save me money.

So let’s make Claude write all of them. Every vendor, in one prompt.

First, connect your Gmail to Claude:

Then paste this one mega prompt: