spend-pulse

What This Skill Does

Spend Pulse is a sophisticated financial monitoring agent designed to keep you on track with your monthly budget. By integrating directly with your financial institutions via Plaid, it provides proactive, intelligent alerts regarding your spending habits. Unlike traditional banking apps that simply show your balance, Spend Pulse calculates your spending pace, comparing your real-time activity against a predetermined monthly target to determine if you are on track, ahead, or behind schedule.

Installation

To install the skill, use the ClawHub command within your OpenClaw environment: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/jbornhorst1524/spend-pulse

For local development or manual installation, you may clone the repository from https://github.com/jbornhorst1524/spend-pulse.git and use npm install && npm run build. After installation, execute spend-pulse setup to initialize your Plaid API credentials, set your monthly budget, and authenticate your accounts via the secure Plaid Link browser flow. Ensure you run spend-pulse sync periodically to update your transaction cache.

Use Cases

• Budget Discipline: Avoid overspending by receiving proactive alerts when your daily spending rate exceeds your monthly budget pace.
• Transaction Monitoring: Automatically catch new, unauthorized, or forgotten transactions as they post to your linked accounts.
• End-of-Month Planning: Receive gentle reminders during the final three days of the month to curb discretionary spending if you are close to your limit.
• Reporting: Quickly retrieve concise summaries of your spending status without logging into multiple bank portals.

Example Prompts

1. "Check my current spending pace for this month and let me know if I'm over budget."
2. "What were the last 10 transactions recorded by Spend Pulse, and how much did I spend in total?"
3. "Summarize my monthly budget progress in one line."

Tips & Limitations

• Pace-based alerts: The tool uses 'pace-delta' logic. A negative value suggests you are spending slower than expected, which is generally good. A positive value indicates you are spending faster than your budget allows.
• Security: Credentials are stored securely in the system Keychain. Never share your Plaid API keys.
• Data Accuracy: Spend Pulse relies on your bank's transaction posting speed; pending transactions may not show up immediately in the check command. Always run sync before requesting a status update for the most accurate data.