Yet a week ago I used Claude Code for my personal finances (not taxes) - I downloaded over a year’s worth of my bank account data. Since I pay for most things by card, if I buy lunch, it’s there.
With a single prompt (and about 10 minutes), it produced an analysis. It solved all the technical issues by itself (e.g., realizing it wasn’t CSV but TSV) and ran quite a few different explorations with Pandas. It was able to write an overview, find items that were likely misclassified, etc.
Everything I checked by hand was correct.
So, instead of pursuing a project to write an AI tool for personal finance, I ended up concluding: “just use Claude Code.” As a side note, I used 14 months of data due to my mistake - I wanted to analyze 2 months of data, since I didn’t believe it would handle a larger set, but I misclicked the year. The file was 350 KB.
Exploratory data analysis is one thing - here the risk is low. If something does not work, it doesn't. Small omissions are not important.
As of now, I would not use automatic AI to make any financial decisions with direct consequences. Unless system is tested and benchmarked against accountants.
Yet a week ago I used Claude Code for my personal finances (not taxes) - I downloaded over a year’s worth of my bank account data. Since I pay for most things by card, if I buy lunch, it’s there.
With a single prompt (and about 10 minutes), it produced an analysis. It solved all the technical issues by itself (e.g., realizing it wasn’t CSV but TSV) and ran quite a few different explorations with Pandas. It was able to write an overview, find items that were likely misclassified, etc.
Everything I checked by hand was correct.
So, instead of pursuing a project to write an AI tool for personal finance, I ended up concluding: “just use Claude Code.” As a side note, I used 14 months of data due to my mistake - I wanted to analyze 2 months of data, since I didn’t believe it would handle a larger set, but I misclicked the year. The file was 350 KB.