Every dollar, precisely placed.
Budget apps and finance apps are rearview mirrors. They categorize what already happened and draw you a chart. I wanted the opposite: an optimizer.
I have tried a lot of them. Bank and card links break constantly. YNAB works, but keeping it current feels like a part-time job. I wanted something dead simple, private (no app gets my data, it all stays local), and pointed at the insights I actually care about. Most of all I wanted the whole picture in one place: childcare, tax returns, car insurance, subscriptions, every place a dollar comes in or goes out, reviewed together.
So I gathered it all: statements from every account (bank, credit cards, investment, retirement), my historical tax returns, all my bills, and my personal favorite, over 10 years of Amazon order history. Then I asked Claude to audit it like the CFO of a Fortune 500 crossed with a scrappy startup, the kind that has to maximize returns while penny-pinching every dollar.
What came back:
- I had left real money on the table for years by missing tax breaks.
- It categorized a decade of embarrassingly large Amazon orders cleanly: household, groceries, electronics, toys, men's and women's clothing, kids' clothes.
- It built a to-do list of specific moves, ranked by dollars saved against the effort to capture them.
Now I just drop in statements as they arrive. It re-files them, reviews everything as a whole through the same CFO lens, and rebuilds the recommendations. It is already easier and more useful than any finance tool I have used, and it feels like I am barely scratching the surface.
Sextant is that system, open-sourced. Every number in this repo is fictional demo data. Open Dashboard.html or the live demo to see what it produces.
Most finance tools stop at tracking. They tell you where your money went. The value here is the optimization layer on top. It reads your actual documents down to the line item and connects them across accounts, so it catches what single-account trackers never see: the Dependent Care FSA you are not using against the childcare you already pay for, the 22% card balance that belongs at 0%, the backdoor Roth blocked by one rollover IRA, the advisory fee quietly costing you every year. Real-time bank feeds are a commodity anyone can wire up. A full-scope, granular lens that names the exact move on every dollar is not. Running locally, with no bank logins and nothing in a cloud, is the bonus that makes feeding it everything safe.
- Sees everything. Bank and card statements, retirement and brokerage statements, Amazon order history, tax returns, real estate, loans. If it is a document, it goes in.
- Files itself. Drop unorganized PDFs in one folder; the
/cfoskill sorts them into the right places. - Rebuilds from raw every run. One script parses your statements into a net worth view, cash-flow trends, category breakdowns, recurring charges (fixed vs variable burn), an account census with freshness, and a debt-payoff strategy.
- Optimizes every dollar. A CFO agent reads the full state and returns ranked findings (fees to cut, tax windows, idle cash, consolidation moves), a tax calendar so nothing lapses at filing time, and a short to-do list.
- Nudges you. A weekday reminder surfaces what is due, escalating only when something is truly urgent.
Net worth, by owner and account, with a liquidity read.
Recurring money split into three buckets: apps you can cancel, utilities you can only rate-shop, and the committed nut.
Accounts as a data-health view, not a spreadsheet.
A to-do list of specific money moves, ranked by urgency, with dollars attached.
Light theme too.
Tabs: Overview, Net worth (by owner, expandable by account), Cash flow (with fixed vs variable burn), Categories, Recurring (grouped, with a category pie and annual-charge highlights), Accounts (visual data-health, not a spreadsheet), and a To-do kanban by urgency. It is a single self-contained Dashboard.html. It renders offline.
You need Python 3 (standard library only, nothing to install) and Claude with the /cfo skill.
- Get the files. Clone or download this repo into a folder you will keep. This folder is your finances folder.
- Install the skill. Point Claude at
cfo-skill/(or zip it into a.skilland install it). It carries the workflow and the CFO agent charter. - See the demo. Open
Dashboard.htmlin a browser. That is this repo's fictional household. - Make it yours. Delete the demo data:
rm -rf _system/raw/* _system/out/* _system/briefs/* # edit _system/rules/accounts.json and _system/state/balances.csv for your accounts - Feed it. Drop your CSV exports (bank, card) into
_system/inbox/and any PDFs into the folder. Then run:or just tell Claudepython3 _system/bin/close.py --system _system --yes/cfoand it does the filing, the run, and the analysis for you. - Read
Dashboard.html. Regenerate any time by re-running the close.
The intended flow is: one folder on your machine that you dump statements into, unorganized. You connect Claude to that folder (Cowork, or Claude Desktop with folder access) and say /cfo. It files the new documents, runs the pipeline, updates the findings and to-do list, and asks you for at most a few missing statements. You never organize anything by hand.
_system/bin/close.py the whole pipeline (pure stdlib + SQLite)
_system/rules/ accounts, categorization, filing map
_system/state/ findings, gaps, to-do, tax calendar, consolidation, balances
_system/raw/ archived source statements (demo)
_system/RUNBOOK.md how to operate it
_system/CONTEXT.md design and decisions
cfo-skill/ the /cfo skill + CFO agent charter for Claude
docs/CFO-System-Plan.md the product plan and the local-only thesis
deploy/ optional: host the dashboard privately behind a passcode
Dashboard.html the generated demo dashboard
Your statements are parsed in memory and archived under _system/raw/ on your own disk. The database is in-memory and thrown away each run. Nothing is sent anywhere. If you fork this for your own numbers, do not commit your data: see .gitignore.
A static, view-only demo runs at https://sextant.febian.com. Everything on it is fictional mock data. Nothing is real and nothing is stored; click through the tabs to see what the tool produces.
This is a personal project shared as-is. It is not financial, tax, legal, or investment advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation. All data in this repository is fictional. Consult a qualified professional before making financial decisions. See the license for the warranty disclaimer.
Built by Febian, a fractional AI and enterprise architect. If you want help building your own local-first system, reach out on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/febian/.
MIT.