A $4,120 paycheque on September 1st.
Overdrawn by September 30th.
Devon Ellis is a 26-year-old junior UX designer in Toronto, about ten months into a first job. They want a $2,500 emergency fund but keep ending the month at zero. This shows where the money goes to waste, the opportunity cost of that spending, and a plan to reach the goal.
Upload one month of transactions as a .csv file. It is analysed entirely in your browser; nothing is uploaded anywhere. Download a sample CSV to see the format (columns like Date, Description, Debit, Credit, Balance; a single Amount column also works).
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How the paycheque becomes an overdraft
The month begins with a small balance and the income, and ends at the closing balance. Each downward step is a group of spending. Amber marks the groups with the most waste.
Three tiers, not one number
Waste is not the same as spending. This separates money that bought nothing from money that leaves without a record, and both of those from lifestyle you chose. Every figure opens to the transactions behind it.
Where the money went
Every dollar of spending, grouped. Amber marks the categories with the most waste.
Where the heavy days fall
Darker cells are heavier spending days. The insights below are computed from the statement.
AI, cross-checked by rules
A frontier model categorized every transaction. A separate rules engine did the same, independently. The score below is the model against a hand-labelled ground truth. The table is where the two methods disagreed, which is where a person should look.
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… transactions. The model was right on …, the rule was right on …. Neither is trustworthy on its own.
This is the whole reason for the cross-check. A single wrong category can flip a decision about what to cut, and frontier models do make errors on financial data.5
| Transaction | AI said | Rules said | Truth | Right |
|---|
Low-confidence calls the model would not make on its own.
Path to the goal
Choose what changes and the timeline updates. Set your own target:
Put in a 3% account, the same amount would be … after one year, of which … is interest given up by spending it instead.
What I would tell Devon
Plain steps, ordered by effort. The first four take an afternoon and cost nothing to do.
Cancel five unused subscriptions this week
Skillshare, Disney+, Amazon Prime, the Paramount+ add-on, and Crave.2 Devon named Netflix and Spotify as the only two they use, so the other five are unused. Crave was also billed twice this month, so cancelling it stops the fee and the duplicate is a separate one-time refund.
Set a low-balance alert
The overdraft fee happened because Devon did not see zero coming. A free low-balance alert defaulting to a $100 balance removes it.7
Move the first $250 on payday, before spending
Automate a transfer the day salary lands, ideally into a TFSA so the interest is tax-free.8, 9 Devon never sees it, so they cannot spend it.
Use in-network machines and track the cash
Two withdrawals were at out-of-network ATMs that add a surcharge.4 The bigger issue is that $630 in cash left with no record. A weekly cash cap makes it visible.
Decide on the gym
At one or two visits a month they are paying $30 to $60 a visit.3 Commit to using it, or switch to a pay-per-visit pass.
Steps 1, 2, and 4 alone recover about $447 a month with nothing Devon enjoys removed, which reaches $2,500 in roughly six months. A starter fund of this size is a sound first goal,10 and Devon is not alone in struggling to save: the Canadian household saving rate was 4.4% late in 2025.11
The pipeline
The statement runs through two independent analyses and a cross-check. The sample is precomputed; an uploaded statement is analysed live in your browser.
References and sources 11 sources
- A synthetic September 2026 chequing statement, written for this project. The persona and every transaction are fictional; no real person's data is used.
- C+R Research, "Subscription Service Statistics and Costs" (consumers underestimate subscription spending by about $133 a month, and 42% have forgotten a paid subscription while still being charged). crresearch.com
- DellaVigna, S., and Malmendier, U. (2006). "Paying Not to Go to the Gym." American Economic Review 96(3): 694-719. aeaweb.org
- Financial Consumer Agency of Canada, guidance on ATM and account fees (non-network ATM withdrawals in Canada typically carry a surcharge, often with a second fee from the machine operator). canada.ca
- "Deficiency of Large Language Models in Finance: An Empirical Examination of Hallucination" (arXiv 2311.15548). arxiv.org
- Bank of Canada policy rate held at 2.25% (June 2026), and Ratehub high-interest savings rates of about 2 to 3%. bankofcanada.ca, ratehub.ca
- Financial Consumer Agency of Canada, "Account alerts" (most Canadian banks offer free balance and low-balance alerts). canada.ca
- Thaler, R., and Benartzi, S. (2004). "Save More Tomorrow." Journal of Political Economy 112(S1): S164-S187. journals.uchicago.edu
- Canada Revenue Agency, TFSA contribution limits (2026 limit $7,000). canada.ca
- Financial Consumer Agency of Canada, "Setting up an emergency fund." canada.ca
- Statistics Canada, "Distributions of household economic accounts, Q4 2025" (household saving rate 4.4%). statcan.gc.ca
The full source notes are in SOURCES.md in the repository.