AI assistants

What the connection is

An AI assistant connected to SavingStat can answer questions about your money in its own chat window. Ask "What did I spend on groceries last month?" and the answer comes from your real transactions, not from a figure you had to look up first.

Nothing is installed and nothing runs on your computer. You give the assistant one address, sign in to SavingStat once, and approve what it may do. From then on the assistant talks to SavingStat directly whenever you ask it something.

What you can ask

Anything your own records can answer. Your balance across every wallet, converted into the currency you think in. What you spent in a period, where the period can be a month, a fortnight, the week of a trip, or one particular day.

The assistant can break that spending down by category, by budget, or by the wallet it came out of, and do the same for money coming in and where it came from. It can also show money you moved between your own wallets, which is neither earning nor spending and which SavingStat leaves out of the totals for that reason.

It can look at the things around the numbers too: the categories and budgets you have set up, the trips you are tracking, the people you share a budget with, the statements and receipts you have uploaded, and the text SavingStat read out of them.

What it can record for you

If you allow changes, describing a transaction is enough to record one: what you paid, when, from which wallet, and what to file it under. The assistant can also correct a transaction you got wrong, move it to a different category, or delete it, which puts the balance back.

Imports arrive as drafts for you to review. An assistant can walk you through them and publish the ones that are right, which is the point at which they start counting.

The assistant can set up the surrounding pieces too: a new wallet, a budget, a category, a trip. It can also invite someone by email to share a budget or a trip with you, which is the one thing it does that reaches a person outside your account.

Whose data it sees

Yours and nobody else's. The permission you grant is tied to your account, and SavingStat checks every request the assistant makes against that account before returning anything. There is no view that spans people.

A budget you share with someone else is visible to the assistant exactly as it is visible to you: the shared budget, not the other person's own records.

Reading and writing are approved separately

When you connect an assistant, SavingStat asks what it may do. Reading and changing are two separate permissions, and you can grant the first without the second.

An assistant approved only for reading can answer questions. Nothing else. If it tries to add, edit or delete anything, SavingStat refuses. Choose this setting if you mainly want to ask questions.

Approving changes lets the assistant record a transaction you describe, correct one you got wrong, rename a wallet, or delete something. Grant it when you want the assistant to keep your records for you, and read the next section first.

How a change is confirmed

An assistant cannot change anything in one step. When it is about to add, edit or delete something, it first asks SavingStat what that would do, and SavingStat replies with a description instead of doing it.

The assistant is expected to show you that description and wait for you to agree before it goes ahead. Deleting a transaction, a wallet or a file is permanent, and deleting a transaction moves your wallet balance back.

Most assistants also ask your permission in their own window before they contact SavingStat at all. Leave that prompt switched on. It is the check that is genuinely under your control, and it matters most with a model you run yourself, which may be less careful about waiting for you than a hosted one.

Text from your documents

An assistant can read the text SavingStat pulled out of a statement or receipt you uploaded. That text came from a document rather than from you, so SavingStat hands it over clearly labelled as something to read and summarise, never as something to obey.

If a document you were sent contains wording aimed at the assistant, asking it to make a change, the assistant is told to report that to you rather than act on it.

Turning access off

Connected apps are listed in your SavingStat settings, along with what each one is allowed to do. Disconnecting one there stops it immediately, and you do not need the app itself to do that, which matters if you have lost access to the app or no longer trust it.

Disconnecting in the assistant's own settings works too, and does the same thing from the other end.

Either way, nothing in your account changes: transactions the assistant recorded stay exactly as they are, because they are your records rather than its. Reconnecting later asks for your approval again from the start.