PSA: I lost $200 on a 'smart' AI budgeting app that just didn't work

I signed up for a six-month subscription to a service called FinFlow AI, hoping it would automate my expense tracking. It kept mis-categorizing purchases, like calling my grocery bill 'entertainment', and its projections were way off. Has anyone found an AI tool for personal finance that actually gets it right?

3 comments

3 Comments

skyler_kim151mo ago

Hold up, let's defend the tech for a minute. These apps learn from our corrections, so every time you fix a category, you're supposedly training it to be better for everyone. Maybe we're just in the early, messy stage where the AI needs more data. The core idea of automating this boring task is still solid, even if the current tools are kinda clumsy. Writing off the whole concept because one app messed up feels like giving up too soon.

lisar142mo ago

Forget the AI for a second and look at the company's data sources. I tried a similar app and it was pulling my transaction info from a third party aggregator, not my bank directly. The categories were already messed up BEFORE the AI even saw them. So the app's "smart" logic was working with garbage data from the start. My coffee at the bookstore got labeled as "media" because of the store's merchant code. The problem might be way deeper than the app's own brain.

mark_hernandez122mo ago

Yeah that's the real issue right there. I had to manually fix like a hundred transactions because the source data was wrong. Ended up just turning off auto-categorize and doing it myself each month.