Monthly
Get last month's spending by category
On the 1st you get totals per spending category and your top merchants, with transfers and card payments left out.
- Runs
- Monthly
- Apps
- Plaid
- AI
- Not needed
- Access
- Transactions product; Item access_token
Send this to your assistant
Create a ClickRuntime automation: on the 1st of each month at 9am, email me last month's Plaid transactions totalled by category, excluding transfers and credit card payments, plus my top 5 merchants by spend.
First time? Adding ClickRuntime to your assistant takes about two minutes.
Why use it
Why teams use this automation
Most people can say roughly what they earn but not where it goes. Bank apps show a long list of transactions, and the totals that would help, such as dining out, subscriptions or travel, require exporting data and building a spreadsheet. So a household that feels short of money each month cannot say whether the cause is groceries, a growing list of subscriptions or a few large one-off purchases.
On the first of the month, last month's transactions are fetched from Plaid and grouped by their personal_finance_category. Totals are calculated for each category, and merchants are ranked by how much you spent with them. One email then shows the top categories, the biggest merchants and the overall total, in a layout that is easy to compare month to month. Anyone preparing for a big purchase finds it useful too.
It is especially useful for budgeting households, freelancers who separate business spending and anyone setting a savings goal.
What you get out of it
See where the money really went
Category totals replace guesses with figures. Many people discover that dining out or subscriptions cost twice what they thought, and that is the starting point for any realistic budget. Real numbers turn vague worry about money into specific choices.
Find merchants that quietly add up
Ranking merchants by total spending shows the places you visit most. A coffee shop or delivery app that looks cheap per visit can turn out to be one of the largest items in the month.
A monthly rhythm that sticks
Because the email arrives on the first, it becomes a monthly money check-in. A regular, ten-minute habit usually works better than a big review you plan to do and never do. Small recurring habits are easy to keep.
Spot subscription creep
Recurring charges appear as a category with a clear total. Reviewing it monthly makes it easy to cancel services you stopped using before another year of payments goes out. Services you forgot about are the easiest savings to find. A monthly look keeps them from running unnoticed for years.
Easier conversations about money
Couples and business partners can look at the same summary and talk about specific categories. That keeps discussions about spending grounded in numbers instead of impressions. Shared money decisions go better when both people look at the same figures. Nobody has to defend a feeling about where the money went.
How it works
What happens, step by step
On the 1st of each month ClickRuntime gets last month's transactions from your linked accounts.
It leaves out transfers and card payments, so only real spending counts.
It totals spending by category and ranks your top merchants.
The category totals and top merchants arrive in your inbox.
Before it runs live
- Connect Plaid
What you get
Build your own
Need it to work differently?
Your own rules
Conditions, thresholds, filters and exceptions, written the way you'd explain them to a colleague.
Any number of apps
One automation can read from one app and update several others. Over 248 apps are ready, and anything with an API works too.
AI where it helps
Summaries, classification, extraction and drafts use ClickRuntime's built-in AI, with no extra key.
On a schedule or on each event
Runs as often as every 5 minutes, or the moment an app sends an event, and keeps track of what it already handled.
Changes you can ask for
- Run it at a different time, more or less often, or only on weekdays
- Add an AI step, for example to summarize, sort or draft a reply
- Add another app, for example also send it to Slack
- Combine it with other Plaid steps into one automation
Under the hood
The code that runs this automation
from collections import Counter
from datetime import date, timedelta
from clickruntime import on_trigger, credentials, http, notify
PLAID = "https://production.plaid.com"
def plaid(path, **body):
auth = {"client_id": credentials.secret("PLAID_CLIENT_ID"), "secret": credentials.secret("PLAID_SECRET"),
"access_token": credentials.secret("PLAID_ACCESS_TOKEN")}
resp = http.post(f"{PLAID}{path}", json={**auth, **body})
resp.raise_for_status()
return resp.json()
SKIP = {"TRANSFER_IN", "TRANSFER_OUT", "LOAN_PAYMENTS"}
@on_trigger
def run(event):
end = date.today().replace(day=1) - timedelta(days=1)
txns, offset = [], 0
while True:
page = plaid("/transactions/get", start_date=end.replace(day=1).isoformat(), end_date=end.isoformat(),
options={"count": 500, "offset": offset})
txns += page["transactions"]
offset = len(txns)
if offset >= page["total_transactions"]:
break
spend = [t for t in txns if t["amount"] > 0 and t["personal_finance_category"]["primary"] not in SKIP]
cats = Counter(); merchants = Counter()
for t in spend:
cats[t["personal_finance_category"]["primary"]] += t["amount"]
merchants[t.get("merchant_name") or t["name"]] += t["amount"]
body = "\n".join(f"{c}: {v:,.2f}" for c, v in cats.most_common())
body += "\n\nTop merchants:\n" + "\n".join(f"{m}: {v:,.2f}" for m, v in merchants.most_common(5))
notify.email_me(f"Spending in {end:%B}: {sum(cats.values()):,.2f}", body)
return dict(cats)FAQ
Common questions
Which categories does it use?
Are transfers between my own accounts counted as spending?
Can I compare to the month before?
What permissions does it need?
Does it need AI?
How many runs does it use?
Can I change how it works?
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