Claude Personal Finance: connect your bank account to Claude

What can Claude see in your bank accounts?

For each account you share, Claude can read the bank's name, the account's name and type, its last four digits, its balance and credit limit, and up to 24 months of transactions. Each transaction comes with its amount, date, merchant, category and the description your bank gives it.

For investments, loans and cards, the reading is thinner than you might expect.

That last row surprises people. Claude can tell you a brokerage account holds $84,000, and it cannot tell you what is in it, what was sold, or when. Plaid's screens may still ask you to agree to share investment and loan data, but Anthropic says Claude reads only the items above.

Plaid passes along only the last few digits of each account number, but if your bank puts a full account number in an account name or a transaction description, Claude can see it there.

Is it safe to connect your bank account to Claude?

The setup is careful in the places that usually worry people. Claude reads your accounts and has no way to move money. Your bank login stays with Plaid. Anthropic says conversations in the Personal Finance page are not used to train its models, and chats that use your accounts are kept out of Claude's memory, out of past-chat search, and out of your monthly recap.

The parts that deserve more thought are the ones you control after the answer comes back. Your account figures can end up in four places.

Under Anthropic's data retention policy, a deleted chat leaves your history right away and Anthropic's storage within 30 days. Unlinking a bank stops Claude from reading it, and figures already in chats, artifacts and shared links stay until you remove them.

Inside any chat, you can switch Plaid off or on from the + button under Connectors, the same place Claude keeps its other connectors. To stop entirely, unlink every bank in Personal Finance, or disconnect Claude from your bank at my.plaid.com.

What are the limits of Claude Personal Finance?

Anthropic lists the limits plainly in its help article. Here they are in one place, grouped by what they affect.

Who can use Claude Personal Finance?

• Paid personal plans only. It is on Pro, Max and Ultra. It is not on the free plan, and it is not on Team or Enterprise.

• United States only. You can link US banks only, and the feature hides itself if you open Claude from outside the US (or through a VPN that says you are elsewhere).

• Moving to a work account unlinks your banks. If your personal Claude account moves into a Team or Enterprise organization, Claude unlinks your banks when the move starts.

• Not in Claude Duet. Personal Finance is unavailable there.

The Team and Enterprise gap matters for professionals. A law firm, accounting firm or financial planner running Claude on a business plan cannot use this feature at all, and it was built for a person looking at their own money anyway.

How far back does Claude Personal Finance go?

Two years. Claude reads up to 24 months of transactions, which covers most budgeting questions and very few legal ones. Questions about a parent's accounts often start well before anyone noticed something was wrong, and the law reaches back further still.

The bankruptcy periods come from the federal rules on preference payments and fraudulent transfers. A trustee can also use state law to reach back further, which is where the four-year window comes from in most states.

Here is what that gap looks like on one account. A large transfer two and a half years ago sits in the part of the history Personal Finance never loads.

Can Claude Personal Finance see investment holdings?

No. For investment accounts, Claude reads the balance and nothing about holdings or trades. For loans and cards, it reads balances and credit limits, without rates or terms. Anthropic also says plainly that Personal Finance is not designed to give investment advice.

How accurate are Claude Personal Finance numbers?

Anthropic's own warnings are the best guide here:

• Claude can make mistakes. Anthropic tells you to check important figures against your bank's app or statements.

• Balances can run a day or two behind. The data comes through Plaid on its schedule, so today's balance may be yesterday's.

• An account can be counted twice. If the same account shows up under two bank logins and the bank describes it differently each time, totals may include it twice.

• Unlinked banks are invisible. Anthropic warns that a budget can show more money left than you have, because spending at a bank you never linked is missing from the math.

That last point is the one people trip over. The dashboard is only as complete as the list of banks you connected, and it has no way to know about the credit union card you forgot. Here is one month where that happens.

The dashboard says you have $2,440 to spare. You have $980.

Can you use Claude Personal Finance in projects or Claude Code?

• Scheduled tasks, Cowork tasks and Claude Code cannot use your linked accounts.

• Projects may not be able to use them either.

• Chats that already ran code, made files or started from an artifact cannot use your accounts. Start a new chat outside a project instead.

• Files are limited inside linked-account chats. Claude can show text and tables and make plain-text files such as a .csv, but Anthropic says it "may not be able to run code or work with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or PDF files."

What happens to your dashboard if you unlink your last bank?

It resets, and the reset is permanent. Unlinking your last bank deletes your widgets, budget settings and setup answers. Data exports do not yet include the Personal Finance dashboard, so there is no saved copy to fall back on. Unlinking also works per login: you cannot unlink one account and keep the others from the same bank.

Can you use Claude Personal Finance for a divorce, bankruptcy or estate case?

Mostly no, and the reasons come straight from how the feature is built.

• It reads only accounts you can sign in to. In a divorce, the accounts in question often belong to the other spouse. In a bankruptcy, they belong to the debtor. With a parent's money, they may be in a name you do not have a login for. Those records arrive as statements: PDFs, scans, or a box of paper. Personal Finance has no way to read them.

• It stops at 24 months. Most disputes about money reach back further than that, as the lookback periods above show.

• It sees the bank's feed, not the printed page. The transactions come through Plaid with Plaid's categories and descriptions. When a figure ends up in a financial affidavit, a trustee's report or an accounting for the court, the other side will ask which statement page it came from, and a chat answer has no page to point to.

• It cannot see what is inside an investment account. If the question is whether stock was sold before a filing or moved before a separation, the balance alone will not answer it.

A single month of a statement shows the problem. Each marked line below is a question a case needs answered, and each answer sits somewhere Personal Finance cannot reach.

In Personal Finance, these lines would arrive with a merchant and a category, such as a transfer, a payment or cash. Answering the marked ones takes the statements for the account ending 8831, the image of check 1047, and records from whoever R Martinez is, which are all documents rather than a login.

There is one place it helps. If you need your own household's spending for a financial affidavit, Personal Finance gives you a quick first look at the last two years. Treat it as a starting point. Our guide to calculating monthly expenses for a financial affidavit walks through the checks the numbers need before you sign anything, such as setting aside transfers between your own accounts.

Can Claude read a PDF bank statement instead?

Yes, in an ordinary chat. You can attach a statement to a regular Claude conversation and ask it to pull out the transactions, which is a separate path from Personal Finance. Our step-by-step guide on how to use Claude to extract bank statement data covers the prompts that work and where the method gets shaky as the stack grows. We also compared ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini on financial document review if you are choosing between them.

For one or two statements you can check by eye, a chat is fine. Once you have years of records across several accounts, and especially when some of those accounts are ones nobody mentioned (our guide on how to find hidden bank accounts shows where they turn up), you need every row of every month, with each figure linked to the page that printed it.

When is Claude Personal Finance the right tool?

When the money is yours, the question is about the last two years, and nobody else needs to check the answer. That covers a lot of ordinary life:

• Finding subscriptions you forgot about.

• Seeing what you spend on groceries, dining out or travel.

• Watching cash flow between paychecks.

• Getting a rough monthly budget before you meet with a planner.

It is a good feature, and the read-only design with Plaid in the middle is a sensible way to build it. The limits only start to bite when the question moves from "where is my money going?" to "where did their money go, and can you prove it?"

How to analyze bank statements you cannot link to Claude

When the records come as statements, from banks you cannot sign in to, going back further than two years, CounselPro reads them as they are. It takes bank, credit card and check statements from virtually any US bank, scans included, and turns every month into rows you can search, total and export. Every figure links back to the statement page it came from, so when someone asks where a number came from, you can show them the page.

You can try it on your own statements with 50 free pages.