Home · Personal · Money & Tax · Banking & budgeting
As of 13 August 2026, AI can show you where your money goes.
Most people should do this themselves; the prompt is on this page.
Can you do it?
5 minutesto a draft.
30 minutesto something you’d act on.
Cost, all in£0
Skill neededchat-fluent
Who has to check ityou
What the alternative costsThe supplied comparison data gives no price for a human budgeting alternative.
If this goes wrong: transactions are put in the wrong categories and you make a poor budgeting decision until you compare the summary with the original statement.
What to actually do
Do it yourself
The route this page recommends
A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 30 minutes until you can act on the result.
How to actually do it
- Open your bank or card provider's online banking and download a CSV or spreadsheet of transactions for the period you want to examine.
- Remove full account numbers, sort codes, addresses and any other personal details that are not needed, while keeping the transaction date, description, amount, balance if available and currency.
- Paste the file into a chatbot or upload it to Julius AI, then paste the supplied prompt with the correct start and end dates.
- Ask the tool to show the overall totals, monthly totals, category totals, recurring payments and uncertain transactions in separate tables.
- Compare the reported income, spending and balance movements with the original bank statement, checking transfers, refunds, duplicates and the transactions flagged as uncertain.
- Correct the categories for ambiguous transactions and ask the tool to recalculate every total until the category totals reconcile with the statement.
- Use the verified recurring payments and category totals to choose one spending change, without treating the analysis as tax, investment or borrowing advice.
Prompt
Analyse the attached bank transaction file for [START DATE] to [END DATE] and show me where my money goes. Use only the transactions in the file and do not invent missing information. First check the date range, currency, duplicate rows, refunds, transfers between my own accounts and missing or unreadable values. Then produce: 1. total money in, 2. total money out, 3. spending by month, 4. spending by category, 5. the largest individual payments, 6. recurring payments, and 7. transactions that need my confirmation. Keep transfers between my own accounts separate from genuine income or spending. Put refunds against the relevant spending where the data supports that, and show the method when it does not. Use clear categories such as housing, utilities, groceries, transport, eating out, shopping, subscriptions, cash withdrawals, debt payments, insurance, health and other, but do not force an uncertain transaction into a category. For every total, show the number of transactions used and make the category totals reconcile to the overall total. Flag anything that does not reconcile. Do not give investment, borrowing, tax or financial advice. Do not retain or repeat full account numbers, sort codes or other unnecessary personal identifiers. End with five factual questions I should answer before changing my budget.
Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.
Use a tool built for this
Second choiceHand it to a person
The distant thirdA person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.
What it gets wrong
- AI cannot know whether a vague transaction description was personal spending, a business cost, a gift or a transfer without your explanation.
- AI cannot access your current bank account unless you deliberately export and provide the data.
- AI can classify a payment neatly but wrongly, especially when merchants sell more than one type of product.
- AI cannot decide which spending changes are realistic for your household or whether a payment is safe to cancel.
- A summary can expose sensitive financial information if you upload an unredacted statement or share the result carelessly.
Even on a YES, the friction has a name: private data access, judgement under ambiguity and consent and privacy.
How we scored this
Five axes, each scored nought to two by hand: ten means AI carries the task cleanly, and the thresholds that turn a total into YES, PARTLY or NO are published in the methodology. Each axis name links to its definition.
| Axis | Score (0–2) |
|---|---|
| Output | 2 |
| Inputs | 2 |
| Verification | 2 |
| Liability | 2 |
| Effort delta | 2 |
| Total | 10 / 10 |
The methodology and its thresholds are published in full.
FAQ
- Can AI categorise my bank transactions?
- Yes. It can group an exported transaction file into categories and calculate totals, but you must check vague descriptions, transfers, refunds and duplicate rows against the original statement.
- Is it safe to upload my bank statement to AI?
- Remove account numbers, sort codes, addresses and other details that are not needed before uploading it. Use a service whose data handling you understand, and do not upload someone else's financial information without their consent.
- Can AI find subscriptions and regular payments?
- It can identify repeated merchants, amounts and payment intervals in the data you provide. It cannot confirm that a payment is still active or tell you whether cancelling it will cause a problem, so check the merchant or your bank before acting.
- Can AI tell me how to improve my budget?
- It can show patterns and ask useful questions about your spending, but it cannot judge your full financial position from transactions alone. This is not professional advice; for debt, fraud or a high-stakes financial decision, speak to your bank or a regulated financial adviser.
Nearby answers
Assessed by gpt-5.6-luna (gpt-5.6-luna) on 2026-08-13, second-checked by an independent model. Wrong somewhere? Email [email protected] and it gets re-checked.
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