Life admin, handled: a bank statement in, this month's budget redrawn on your Mac, for nothing

The press release we would want to write

Households can now close the month’s budget from their own bank export, on their own Mac, without a spreadsheet and without handing their statements to a service. Orionfold Flow’s Household Budget is a page that reads the CSVs in its statements folder and sorts every line with rules you can read. Press Run and it redraws the month against your plan: spending, income, savings rate, category against budget, the merchants that took the most, and the lines no rule caught. In our walk, a 35-line September statement was summed and sorted about a second after Run. Every figure on the page matched our own independent calculation to the cent. A model on the laptop then wrote a paragraph about the month in about 49 seconds, and all 20 figures in it traced back to the data. Teaching it three merchants and running again took one more press. The model cost was $0.00 both times.

“Close the month without a spreadsheet marathon, and keep my bank files off someone else’s server.” — The path’s own brief, from the Flow Guide. Illustrative, not from a customer.

The answer first

The budget is a folder of files: your statements, a page of rules, and the page that draws the month.

1. Choosing the path makes your copy. One click on Home made Household Budget, a folder of your own with sample statements, the plan, and the page.
2. Your statement replaces the samples. We put September’s CSV in statements/ and moved the two sample months out. This build has no way to do that from inside Flow, so it is a Finder step (#849).
3. Run redraws the month. Run worked out every total from the statement in about a second and redrew the page’s four charts and three tables. A laptop model then wrote the Overnight notes. You review the eight changes and keep them.
4. The page tells you what it could not place, and you teach it. Five lines matched no rule. We added three rules to Budget Profile, ran again, and the page placed them. The two lines left (a vet visit and a Zelle payment) are the ones the page says a person should identify first.

Two cautions before you start. In this build, the paragraphs at the top of the page still describe the sample August after you run it on your own month (#848), so read the charts rather than the opening. And a link from the page to Budget Profile does nothing while the Flow Guide is open beside your copy (#847). Open Budget Profile from the sidebar instead.

The job

The job: at the end of each month, see where the money went against the plan, find the spending that has no explanation yet, and decide whether next month’s plan needs changing. Keep the bank records private.

The usual way: a spreadsheet you rebuild or paste into each month, or a budgeting service that connects to your bank. We did not time or price either, so we make no claim about them.

The Flow way: the path Life admin, handled, in three steps: make a copy of the Household Budget, replace the sample statements with your own, and Run Jobs to redraw the month’s totals.

Step one: make your copy

Home’s Life filter shows the path, with its promise underneath: “Saves time”, “Private”, “Free to start”. Clicking the card at 09:27

The copy holds the page (Household Budget), the plan (Budget Profile), the definition that does the arithmetic (Budget Refresh), a data folder for its captures, and a statements folder with two made-up months, July and August 2026. Before you run anything, the page shows the sample August (shot 03).

Step two: put your statement in statements/

Our input is an invented September statement from an invented credit union: 35 lines, with the headers Date, Description and Amount, ISO dates, and spending as negative numbers. That is the format Budget Profile asks for. We planted five lines that none of the sample rules would place: a school book fair, an airline ticket, a bakery paid through Square, a vet visit, and a Zelle payment to a person.

We first tried the obvious way in: File ▸ Import…. It does not take a CSV. The panel greys the file out and says what it does take: Word documents, Excel workbooks, PowerPoint presentations and PDFs (shot 04). The sidebar takes no file drop either. So in this build the statement goes in through Finder. Choose Reveal in Finder from the page’s title menu, then drag the CSV into statements/, as the README says. We did the same thing with a Finder-equivalent copy at 09:30

Set your plan in Budget Profile is the other half of this step. We left the sample plan (income $9,800, a 20% savings target, eleven category budgets totalling $7,810) as it was for the first run, and came back to the rules afterwards (step four, below).

Step three: Run, and review what changed

Run is at the end of the page’s job ribbon: Collect data, Watch sources, List a folder’s files, Overnight notes. We pressed it at 09:30

• The capture was written 1.4 seconds after the press, at 09:30
  .6. It read the plan’s three tables and the one statement, and wrote data/spending-2026-09-30.json.
• The page’s views redrew in about 8 seconds, one per second (the last change at 09:30
  ).
• Overnight notes ran on the laptop (Flow Runtime, qwen3.8-27b-4bit). It took 3,358 tokens in and wrote 198 out, and the paragraph landed at 09:31
  , 49 seconds after the press. Flow checked all 20 figures in it against the tables before writing it.

The banner then read “Document review ready · 8 awaiting a decision”, naming the model that wrote (shot 06).

The month against the plan. $6,916 spent, 89% of the $7,810 plan. Income of $9,800 was received, as expected. The savings rate is 29.4%, 9.4 points above the 20% target, but only $1,500 was actually moved to savings, 77% of the $1,960 the target implies (shot 07). The page keeps those two facts apart on purpose: money left over is not money saved. We recomputed every one of these figures from the CSV and the rules ourselves, and they match.

Categories against their budgets. Housing is exactly on budget ($2,950). Utilities is a dollar over ($321 of $320). Everything else is under. There is a new bar the sample did not have, Uncategorized, at $895 (shot 08).

The last months, stacked now shows one month, because September is the only statement left in the folder (shot 09). The chart keeps a column for every statement you leave in statements/, so it fills in as the months accumulate. How the month accumulated is a small line of the running total (shot 10). Its side figure, “Average 5.45k”, is the average of a running total, which is not a useful number (#850).

Review lists all eight changes, each with Revert and Keep: four charts, Where it went, Lines no rule caught, the inventory of statements/, and the Overnight notes (shot 11). Its Sources tab traces each one to the capture and the files it was built from (shot 12). It names Budget Profile.md three times, once for each of its tables, without saying which (#851). We kept all eight at 09:35

The Overnight notes read the tables back in a paragraph (shot 13). We checked each of the twelve figures in it against the capture, and every one is right: $6,916 against $7,810, the 29.4% rate, $1,500 against $1,960, groceries $552 of $900, dining $106 of $450, utilities $321 of $320, $895 uncategorised, rent $2,950, daycare $1,350, the $386 airline ticket, and the $300 Zelle payment.

Step four: teach it the lines it could not place

Lines no rule caught lists the five planted lines and says what to do: identify them, add a rule in Budget Profile, and run again. Transfers and refunds need a person’s review first (shot 14).

We added three rules to the end of Budget Profile’s Rules table, a match and a category each: ALASKA AIR → Travel, HARBOR SCHOOL → Kids and CORNER BAKERY → Dining (shot 15). The file saved itself at 09:38

Run again at 09:39

• Travel is now over budget: $386 against $300. The airline ticket had been hiding in Uncategorized.
• Kids rose to $1,396 of $1,400, and Dining to $123.
• Uncategorized fell from $895 to $445: the vet ($145) and the Zelle payment ($300) (shot 17).
• The monthly total did not move ($6,916), because the rules only move lines between categories.

The second notes paragraph was accurate too, but it did not mention that Travel had gone over budget. The chart shows it plainly. The notes describe the tables; they do not promise to flag everything, and the page says as much (“they do not validate your bank records”). We kept the five changes at 09:41

The deliverable

• This month’s review, redrawn. The Household Budget page, with September against the plan in four charts and three tables, and a paragraph about the month written on the laptop.
• A capture you can keep. data/spending-2026-09-30.json holds every figure the page shows. The sample’s own capture, from 2 September, sits beside it.
• Rules that stay taught. The three new rules are rows in Budget Profile. Next month’s statement is sorted with them.
• Your statements, as files. statements/ holds the CSV exactly as the bank exported it, with its size and a digest recorded on the page’s inventory after each run.

What it costs, measured

The honest reading: the arithmetic is not a model’s job here. It is a definition you can read, run in about a second, and it came out right to the cent. The model’s only job is the paragraph. On the laptop that took under a minute, for nothing. The same paragraph from a cloud model would cost under two cents a month. We walked one month; a year of statements, or a bank export in another layout, is not something we measured.

FAQ

What leaves my Mac? Nothing we could find. The run’s receipts show the capture read only the plan and the statement in this folder. The one model call was routed to flow-runtime, the laptop’s own runtime. We did not capture network traffic, so this rests on the receipts, not on a packet trace.

Does it connect to my bank? No. It reads the CSV files you put in statements/. The page says so: “it is not a connection to your bank”.

My bank’s export looks different. The definition expects Date, Description and Amount, with ISO dates and spending as negative numbers. Budget Profile says a bank that exports debits and credits in separate columns has to be converted to that first. We did not test another layout.

How are lines sorted? By the Rules table, in order. The first rule whose match appears anywhere in the description wins, ignoring capitals. So put more specific rules above general ones.

What does it cost? The Home card says “Free to start”. Running Jobs is part of Flow Pro, which includes 10 Pro Days to start, then costs $10 a month or $96 a year. We walked on a licensed dev build, so we did not see what an unlicensed first run shows. Reading, writing, searching, organising and exporting are free forever.

Evidence