Then you need to double check all the results because LLMs can't be trusted to accurately select retail stores or deductible purchases.

Well that's a different argument, now isn't it?

What time does it save you if you still have to read through just as many entries to validate as you do to sort?

If you're the type who double-checks your work and this is important: 40% of the time.

If you're the type who doesn't: probably 90% of the time.

This feels like goal-post moving now, with questions less genuinely curious about an answer and more trying to "get" me. How am I supposed to answer that, it depends on the task and the model and the harness and specific human being using it.

Use it or don't, I don't care, but at least be genuine in the discussion.

Do I need to? If I moderately underestimate my entertainment spending because my Apple+ subscription got categorized as a grocery purchase, that doesn't seem like a big problem.

If you don't care to that level then why not put your finger in the air and just come up with a made up estimate yourself?

Like most people, my finger in the air estimates are hugely biased towards underestimating how much I spend. An AI budget app that has like 50% accuracy would probably still not be useful, but 90% accuracy is fine, and while I have not gone around trying to audit AI budget apps I suspect the accuracy for good products is even better than that.

If you're gonna go the extra mile and use an AI-powered system to be able to cross-check data more in depth than a run of the mill report from your bank, it means you want 100% accuracy, not 90%.

The funny thing is that these expanded examples were already features in the budget app I use before AI came along.

What’s the budget app that lets you ask for transactions at luxury stores? Or retail establishments vs online?

Pretty much any banking app will classify the transactions nowadays?

Literally zero banking apps will classify them as "luxury" or "retail establishment" unless you set that up in advance.

What frustrates me is that there's the potential to bake much more information into transaction history.

There's a huge spec (Level III data) that lets the merchant provide full line item detail with every credit card purchase.

Corporate cards get it, but consumers don't. The payment ecosystem often doesn't even submit it if the card isn't identified as a corporate card.

If you had that, you'd probably need way less "smarts" to build budgeting tools-- no need to try to reconcile bank records with order reciepts.