Living in Germany with financial ties to Ukraine means three bank accounts, two countries, two currencies, and a lot of monthly bookkeeping nobody wants to do.

For years I’ve tracked every transaction in plain text files — think of it as a spreadsheet, but stored in simple text that I can search, version, and back up like any other document. The system works great. The data entry? Not so much.

Every month: log into three banks, download statements, match each transaction to a category, update the books, file expense reports. An hour of tedious work that I kept postponing until the weekend.

So I automated the whole thing with an AI assistant.

What It Does Now

Every night at 10 PM, the AI:

1. Connects to all three banks and downloads the latest transactions
2. Categorizes each transaction — groceries, insurance, school fees, subscriptions — using rules I’ve taught it over time
3. Saves everything to my accounting files and backs them up
4. Sends me a summary on Discord: balances, new transactions, anything it couldn’t categorize

When it finds a new merchant it hasn’t seen before, it flags it. I reply with the category — “that’s a pharmacy” — and it remembers forever.

The Expense Report Part

Here’s what I’m most proud of. Some of my bank charges are business-related and need to be filed as expense reports. Cloud services, work tools, that kind of thing.

The AI now does this automatically:

1. Sees the charge on my bank statement
2. Looks up the amount in local currency
3. Creates an expense claim in the accounting software
4. Done

What used to be: download statement → open accounting app → fill in the form → save → forget for three months and do them all at once. Now it just happens.

What Surprised Me

Teaching is faster than doing. The first month, I had to categorize about 30 merchants. The second month, maybe 5 new ones. By the third month, almost everything is automatic. Each correction makes the system smarter.

The AI handles the boring parts, not the decisions. It doesn’t decide how to categorize a new restaurant. It asks me. It doesn’t file expense claims without permission. It asks first. But it never forgets to download statements, never fat-fingers an amount, and never procrastinates until Sunday evening.

Three banks, two countries, one conversation. German bank, PayPal, Ukrainian bank — the AI talks to all three using their respective interfaces. I just see the summary.

The Monthly Effort Now

Before: ~1 hour of manual bookkeeping per month, usually done reluctantly.

Now: maybe 5 minutes categorizing a few new merchants in a chat message. Everything else runs on autopilot.

The books are always up to date. Expense claims get filed on time. And I stopped dreading the last Saturday of the month.

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If you’re curious about the technical setup: the system uses ledger-cli for accounting, connects to German banks via the FinTS protocol, and talks to Manager.io for company expense claims. The AI orchestration runs on OpenClaw. Everything is version-controlled in Git.