Your butler keeps the books

What you’ll do: understand how the money features work, and what each company can see.

The chain

1. Your bank holds your accounts.
2. Lunch Money connects to your bank, with your permission, and collects your transactions. Most people use it to budget on its own website. Your butler uses it as a tidy, read-only source of numbers.
3. Your butler asks Lunch Money for your transactions with a token, a kind of read-only key that you store in the Keychain. It adds them up, on your Mac.
4. Claude only ever sees finished totals, like “daily spending: 412 of 900”. Never your transactions or account details.

Who sees what

Who	What they see
Lunch Money	Your transactions, as with any budgeting app. Read their privacy policy before you sign up.
Your butler, on your Mac	Your transactions, added up locally
Claude	Only a few finished totals for the brief
Us, Build Your Butler	Nothing. Ever.

What you’ll do: create a Lunch Money account and connect your bank accounts. Claude can’t do this part for you, and shouldn’t.

Steps

1. Go to Lunch Money and sign up. Check the current price and trial first.
2. Choose your primary currency, the one most of your spending is in.
3. Connect your bank accounts and credit cards. Lunch Money guides you through each bank’s own login screen.
4. Type your bank logins into the bank’s own screens only. Never into Claude, never into an email.
5. Leave out investment and retirement accounts if you like. Your butler can ignore them anyway.
6. Wait for the transactions to arrive. Some banks take a few hours, and some take a day.

What you’ll do: create a Lunch Money access token and store it in the Keychain.

Steps

1. In Lunch Money, open Settings, then Developers.
2. Request or create an access token. Name it after your butler. Copy it.
3. In Claude Code, in the Butler folder, type:

4. Claude opens the Butler window: “Your Lunch Money access token”. Paste it and click Save.
5. Claude tells you which currency your butler will use, and asks whether any of your budget is in a second currency, for example if you’re paid in dollars and spend in euros.

What you’ll do: learn the simple idea that keeps your butler’s money section honest.

Most budgets go wrong because they mix three very different kinds of spending. Your butler keeps them apart.

1. Fixed monthly expenses

The same bills every month: rent or mortgage, insurance, phone, the nanny’s salary. Your butler checks them against the plan: paid or not yet, and whether the amount changed.

2. Daily spending

Food, transport, eating out, household bits. It varies day to day, so your butler paces it: by the 15th of a 30-day month, you’d expect to have spent about half. The brief says whether you’re on pace, ahead or behind.

3. One-offs

A new sofa, a deposit, a car repair. Big and rare. Your butler names them and keeps them out of the other two, so one sofa doesn’t make the whole month look like a disaster.

An example (invented)

In October, the Riveras’ daily spending plan is €900. On the 12th they’ve spent €412, which is on pace. They also bought a €640 sofa. It shows as a named one-off, and the €412 stays an honest picture of their everyday spending.

What you’ll do: let Claude draft your categories and budget from your real spending, then adjust it together.

Steps

1. Claude reads about four months of your transactions through Lunch Money, on your Mac. It works out monthly averages in Python. It won’t paste your transactions into the chat.
2. Claude proposes a short list of budget categories, usually 8 to 15, such as Home, Food, Transport, Kids, Health, Fun. It maps each Lunch Money category onto one.
3. Claude asks which categories are daily spending to pace through the month. Food and transport usually are. Rent never is.
4. Claude asks about accounts to ignore, such as investments and retirement.
5. Claude drafts your budget workbook, a spreadsheet in the Butler folder called budget/budget.xlsx, with your fixed monthly expenses and your income. It proposes amounts from your averages.
6. You adjust. Say things like “Food should be 700, not 640” or “The gym is cancelled, remove it.”
7. Claude runs Butler’s checks to make sure everything adds up.

What you’ll do: preview the brief with money in it, and check one number yourself.

Steps

1. Say:

2. In the brief, find the Money section: daily spending against plan, and fixed monthly expenses paid so far.
3. Check one number. Open Lunch Money, look at this month’s spending in one daily category, and compare. Small differences can come from pending transactions.