Spending Review

Overview

Produces a categorized breakdown of your spending for a given period, compares it against prior months to show trends, and highlights categories where spending increased or decreased significantly.

Wilson Tools Used

• spending_summary — get total spending grouped by category for any date range
• transaction_search — drill into specific categories for transaction-level detail

Workflow

1. Run spending_summary for the current month to get category-level totals.
2. Run spending_summary for the previous month to establish a comparison baseline.
3. Calculate the dollar change and percentage change for each category between the two months.
4. Flag any category where spending increased by more than 20% or more than $100.
5. For each flagged category, run transaction_search with category: "<flagged_category>" and months: 1 to pull the individual transactions driving the increase.
6. Present results as a summary table with columns: Category, This Month, Last Month, Change ($), Change (%), Trend Arrow.
7. Below the table, list the top 3 categories by absolute spending and the top 3 by percentage increase.
8. Provide a one-paragraph narrative summary describing the overall spending pattern and notable changes.