I tried using Gemini to track my expenses — it didn’t even come close

Ever since AI made a hard landing in our lives, I wake up every day to a new way it could automate some random chore and make my life just a little less miserable and a lot easier. AI can do what it does best — analyze data and find patterns — and that basic system could help with a lot of everyday stuff in my life. One thing that matters a lot to me and where I really wish AI would help is expense tracking and budgeting.

There was a version of me a few years ago who did not care how often I swiped my cards or how much those random, expensive sprees were costing me. They were not all wasteful expenses, but I did not really know where exactly my money was going. After my bank balance started taking a hit, I could no longer ignore and did something I had never done before: I started tracking my expenses.

All my credit cards and bank apps have expense analyzers that categorize transactions. The problem is that the data is spread across too many cards and accounts for those pie charts to make sense. I wanted something that consolidated everything into one place with more cohesive categorization, so I knew I needed a third-party tool.

Before I settled on an app, I tried a bunch of them. It was not a decision I could make lightly because once you log months or years of financial data in one place, switching is painful, as it leaves you with a blank slate to start all over again. So, I was thorough.

The most convenient apps were the ones that tracked SMS on Android and picked up transaction data automatically. However, a lot of them moved my private data to the cloud for analysis, which often left me uncomfortable. I sure don’t want another living being knowing exactly how much I burn on food apps. But for the sake of science, I still tested them to see what they offered. I ditched most when they started selling me loans and credit cards. That is a clear sign of financial data misuse, and I could not spend another day with that.

I eventually found an uninspiringly named app on the Play Store called Expenses Manager. It is feature-rich, supports offline data processing, and has cross-platform support — which mattered because SMS tracking is not an option on iPhones. The big downside is that you have to enter every single transaction manually. Between financial privacy and this level of chore, I chose privacy and accepted the work.

I have stuck with that app for years, and it has helped me move between Android and iPhone without losing my logs. But I still get furious every time I have to log another expense manually. Each time, I’m left thinking: please, someone let AI take over this.

Trust is a big deal with third-party apps, especially when money is involved. Google is nosier than most companies, sure, but it has clearer privacy policies and practices than a lot of third-party, no-name alternatives. That makes me slightly more comfortable with Google doing this work than with some random startup.

More importantly, I have a bunch of cards and bank accounts. One place that ties them all together is SMS and email, specifically Google Messages and Gmail, which Gemini already has access to. Banks here in India are required to send SMS for inward and outward transactions, so my phone and inbox already contain a timeline of most of my spending. All Gemini would need to do is learn to read those texts and find patterns, so I could ditch the dedicated expense manager app and save myself a lot of manual work.

Gemini now lives in Gmail if you have a compatible Google One AI plan in personal or Workspace capacity. So, I fired up the chat and asked it to find all my expenses for the current month. It scanned my emails from banks and returned a list of transactions. It even went one step further and summarized how much I had spent that month without me asking.

It sort of worked, but not fully. Gemini missed a couple of transaction emails — I would not have noticed those had I not remembered the transactions. When I asked it to track last month’s expenses, it told me I had no activity on one instance, even though I clearly did. If it cannot reliably spot transactions, how can I expect it to find patterns or compare my habits with older data?

With financial data, consistency and reliability matter most, and Gemini failed at both.

I prefer hyper-focused AI that does one task and does it well rather than shoving a general-purpose chatbot everywhere. Pixel’s screenshot app is a good example. It collects screenshots in one place and helps you analyze them without making you jump between apps.

Google could pull the most insane trick ever by building a dedicated expense tool along those lines. I would be happy even if it were built into Google Messages or Gmail as a dedicated feature. But it needs to be far more robust and purpose-built for money management, compared to what Gemini currently offers.

For starters, it must track transactions accurately without goof-ups. It must parse cryptic bank SMS and emails and know what category each merchant belongs to for proper categorization. With months of clean compartmentalization, you would end up with a solid dataset you could use for comparisons and budgeting. You could then ask Gemini where you spend the most and where to cut next month to make up for shortfalls.