Personal Project · 2023-09-15

Budget Auto-reconciler

Automated reconciliation flow that ingests transactions, applies categorisation rules, and syncs to budget tooling — built to reduce manual effort and improve financial decision cadence.

Problem

Manual transaction reconciliation is repetitive, error-prone, and usually delayed. Personal finance workflows and small finance operations both suffer when categorisation and sync depend on someone remembering to do it weekly.

Who it serves

Individuals managing personal budgets and finance teams who need timely, accurate transaction categorisation without increasing operational overhead.

Ownership

End-to-end pipeline design: authenticated ingestion, normalisation rules, budget API integration, scheduling, secrets management, and audit logging.

Architecture

  1. Data ingestion — authenticated scraping with MFA and session rotation handling
  2. Transaction normalisation — parsing, cleaning, and deterministic category mapping
  3. Budget API sync — idempotent posts with duplicate checks and reconciliation logic
  4. Scheduled runtime — GitHub Actions for daily execution with structured logs

Technologies

Python · requests · BeautifulSoup · REST budget API · GitHub Actions · GitHub Secrets

Constraints

  • Financial data requires secure credential handling and idempotent sync behaviour
  • Source systems change markup and session behaviour without notice
  • Failures must be debuggable from structured logs, not silent drift

Outcome

Turns a high-friction personal finance task into a low-touch system. The same automation pattern applies to financial operations where transaction integrity, categorisation accuracy, and processing timeliness matter.

Workflow automation · data pipelines · API integration · reporting systems

Get in touch

Discuss finance automation or integration work.