The ten-minute money close
Once a month I sit down and ask one question: what did we actually keep? The answer used to take an evening. Now it asks me for two numbers and hands me the rest.
Tabled for now. Built, not on the homepage, still true.
The job I gave away
The monthly money reckoning. Income in, spending out, and the real question underneath, which is whether the thing I'm working so hard on is actually working. I avoided it for the same reason everyone does. It took forever and the answer might be bad.
What runs now
My system reads every money email it can see and builds one ledger, 30 months of it so far. Then it stops and asks for the two things it can't see. One is a figure that only exists in an account it can't read. The other is money people handed me without a receipt. It won't guess either one. It says: here is what I have, give me these two, and I will finish.
Then I get one number. What I kept. This month, this year, and against the same months last year. And it says on its face that the number is a floor, because there's always something small it couldn't see.
Set up once
Open Projects, New project, name it Money Close
Paste the prompt below into its instructions.
In your bank app, find Statements or Export and check you can save last month as a file. That file is the whole input.
The first month, tell it the eight categories you want and say remember these
Every month after sorts the same way.
What it hands back
MONEY IN
Payroll deposits (2): 8,240.00
Venmo from Erin W: 40.00
Total in: 8,280.00
MONEY OUT
Housing: 1,850.00
- Mortgage: 1,850.00
Utilities: 132.40
- Electric: 132.40
Groceries: 499.68
- Kroger (3 trips): 499.68
Gas: 100.90
18 more lines follow.
The first run
On the 1st, share last month's statement into Money Close: the share button in your bank app, then Claude. It runs on this:
Sort these into money in and money out. Group the money out into no more than eight categories that make sense for a household. Total each. Then ask me for anything you would need to finish the picture that is not in here, like cash, a paycheck that lands somewhere else, or a bill I paid another way. Do not estimate anything. Ask.
It will stop and ask for what it can't see. Answer in voice mode. Then say: one line, what did we keep last month.
Make it stick
A monthly alarm on the 1st labelled Money Close. Write the one line in the Money Close sheet from the kit. You're building a trend line, and the trend is what you'll act on.
Where this goes wrong
Counting the same money twice. My supplier sends two emails for one order, and adding both made my lifetime spend look a third higher than it was. Every money event gets exactly one identity, an order number or a date plus an amount, and new ones merge into that instead of piling onto a list.
The rule underneath
Never let it fill a gap with a guess. A blank you know about is honest. A number it made up looks exactly like a real one, and you'll build on it.
Numbers on this page come from my own system, computed 2026-09-10: 30 months in the money ledger rollup.