I Let an AI Log 48 Transactions in My Budget

Last week I had Claude, the AI assistant I use, enter 48 transactions into my budget in one sitting. It was my first real use of AI write access, meaning an assistant that can add and change entries, on my own Trupocket account.

Of the 48, 41 came from a recent trip abroad. Several of those were charged in a foreign currency. The other 7 were everyday purchases. Most entries started as a photo of a receipt or a PDF invoice, and a few came from my trip spreadsheet and my bank history instead.

Reading a receipt from a photo has been possible for years, so this post is about everything around the reading: what I checked before anything was saved and what the assistant was not allowed to do.

What the assistant did

It read amounts and dates from the photos and from the PDF invoices. When a receipt had no date on it, it took the date from the photo itself. When a receipt did not show which card I paid with, it worked out which card had been used. It noticed a tip that was charged separately from a purchase already in my budget. It also split one invoice across categories.

It recorded each foreign purchase at the amount my bank actually charged. That was the biggest time saving of the whole sitting. Normally I cross-reference every foreign charge against the bank to enter the correct amount, and that step always slows my budgeting down.

A few entries were slightly off. I caught them in my review, and Claude and I refined the list together until it was right. Overall it did a really good job.

One review for the whole batch

I checked that the amounts and dates had been read correctly, and I went through the payee, date, and memo the assistant suggested for each entry. The final list was correct before anything was written.

Then I approved the batch once, which saved me a notable amount of time over approving each transaction.

After writing, the assistant read every transaction back and compared it with the list I had approved.

The review and the read-back both come from a set of instructions I use with Claude. Neither one is a Trupocket feature.

This connects to something I wrote in June. In that post about AI acting on your money, I argued that an AI able to move money should get approval for each action before it runs. That argument rested on money being hard to get back once it moves. Logging is a different job. It records money that was already spent. For that job, one review of the whole batch was the right amount of control, and I did not want 48 separate approvals.

The limits on the connection

Claude reached my budget through a connector, its name for a saved link to an outside service. The link runs on Model Context Protocol, or MCP, an open standard that any assistant supporting it can use, and Trupocket has run an MCP server since June.

My connection was the one-click Claude connection. It could add and edit, and it could not delete. Deleting is a separate permission. One-click connect asks for reading and writing only. My view is that deleting is ultimately destructive, so keeping it separate follows security best practice.

Write access requires Pro or above. Premium is read-only. The pricing page lists both plans.

A transaction that matches one already in the budget is refused unless the assistant marks it as intentional. An assistant also has no tool for changing loan, mortgage, or credit card settings.

Each write is logged with the values before and after the change. Every member of the household can see that log, and it is kept for 12 months. Trupocket has an API, the interface other programs use to talk to it. The activity log is readable only through the API. I plan to add a view of it to the web app.

Trupocket has no switch of its own for a one-click connection. Disconnecting happens on the assistant's side, which in Claude means going to Customize and then Connectors.

Where those 48 transactions live

The budget those transactions landed in is Trupocket. It is built for people who track every transaction themselves, and on Pro or above a connected assistant can help with the entry.