Comment by jasim
Plain Text Accounting has become significantly easier to do for me on a regular basis, thanks to LLMs. Specifically: importing bank statements into hledger and avoiding manual entry.
I use a JSON file to map bank entries to my hledger accounts. For new transactions without mappings, I run a Python script that generates a prompt for Claude. It lists my hledger accounts and asks for mappings for the new entries.
Claude returns hledger journal entries based on these mappings, which I can quickly review.
Then another script prints out hledger journal entries for that month's bank transactions, all cleanly mapped. It takes me just a few minutes to tweak and finalize.
I can also specify these mapping instructions in plain-language which would've otherwise been a fragile hodgepodge of regexps and conditionals.
You don't consider an LLM fragile? Also bold to send your banking information to Anthropic.