How to Build Your Own AI Financier? 3 Rules for Your Money

A solo ToTheMoon episode that Alexander Volchek recorded on the way from Los Angeles home to Silicon Valley. The occasion was a walk along Laguna Beach with a close friend: she had started doing a lot in Codex for her business, and Alexander advised her to keep her financial records through Codex or Claude Code. The topic seems useful only to those who have a business, but, he says, it will help everyone get their finances in better order. To viewers who complained that Codex and Claude Code can't be integrated with banks, he points out that in the US ChatGPT connects, through its Finance module, to essentially all financial institutions.

The conversation covers two cases at once: a small business, a sole proprietor, a self-employed person or a tutor — and personal finances: rent, school, food, utilities, parking. We are moving into a new world of automation, Alexander says, and in a year the systems will be different — OpenAI has already announced a new direction of AI for devices. But for now the point is short-term: building reporting, even to international standards, has become very easy, and that is not a reason to worry more or less but a new tool for assessing your business or your overall financial situation at any moment.

The place to start is a paid version and a strong model. A friend of Alexander's who took up automating his finances complained that "dumb ChatGPT Codex doesn't understand anything" — and he had the lightest model set. Alexander recommends GPT-6.1 Sol or GPT-6 Astra in Extra High or Max mode, and in Claude Code, Opus 5.5 or Fable 5.1 in Max mode. The connection should be read-only: the AI must not be able to pay. If the bank can't do that, you can email yourself transactions and statements or upload them by hand once a week, without letting the future routine stop you from starting. The episode transcripts on besolid.com, he notes, can be given to Codex directly as instructions.

The main thing is to explain to the system what lies behind payments: a partner paid for you, you paid for a friend and he sent the money back to your card, and the system counts it as revenue. Alexander recently bought a server computer for corporate use with his personal card, briefly told Codex to take it into account — and Codex itself found, in his accounts and email, which computer it was and where it was bought, saw the receipts, and will later ask how to account for it: as a one-off expense or amortised over several years.

The feeling that you are becoming transparent Alexander calls pointless paranoia: you are transparent anyway — a huge number of authorities have access to your email, and passwords could just as well be stolen by Google mail, Yandex mail or a cloud drive. The real question is what you gain and what new conclusions these systems will be able to draw. The first rule is to tell yourself that all income and expenses will be in this system, even if you spend very little: a bank's accounting is incomplete, and today there are too many payments, transfers and subscriptions. Because of wrong accounting, he says, families suffer and a huge number of companies go bankrupt.

The second rule is to load tax returns and financial reports for the last three to five years, and if there are none, at least bank statements; more than five years, he says, is not needed. The system will find errors even in past years' reporting — not to catch out an accountant or a tax officer, but to teach Codex or Claude Code your internal rules. Most people don't think in terms of finances; no financial adviser, tax specialist or financier, Alexander believes, will do what this system can do every day — and you need to live through it yourself rather than hand it to your financier.

The third rule is to build a system for the future. Alexander describes how he kept QuickBooks — the American counterpart of 1C — and at first wanted Codex to run it correctly; the right way is to think as if neither QuickBooks, nor 1C, nor familiar financiers and accountants existed. That doesn't mean firing people: like a courier who has to master the car, a financier must work by new rules and build a system for the company in which he, as the financier, isn't there. An example of where this leads is Nikita Bier's tweet "Does anyone else remember how to code?" and the forecast that ordinary people will take over plumbers' work. Alexander advises an employee to load their employment contract and motivation scheme into the system, a family to discuss its expenses with Codex, and those who begrudge twenty dollars for the system to learn to spend money in order to get more.

The goal of such accounting is not saving on coffee or a stress mode but learning to understand. An example is the story of xAI developers reposting that Grok Bot would help sue over spam for five hundred dollars a call, while ChatGPT told Alexander that the stress from unblocked spam would outweigh the winnings. Finance is a rare area that everyone needs: the belief that the dollar is done for, the bread of Naberezhnye Chelny and the potatoes of Peru show how easy it is to take someone's words for fact and how AI makes it possible to check them. Accounting also reveals debts: memberships sold in advance, the ARR trick that passes off October's annual subscriptions as twelve million dollars of annual revenue, and a hundred-dollar ChatGPT Pro subscription that will get more expensive. The episode ends with doubt that Sam Altman really wants to give everyone a lot of compute, and a recap of the three rules: what Alexander is describing, in essence, everyone should have done half a year ago.

The episode invites you to see an AI financier not as a way to save money or a replacement for an accountant, but as a trainer for financial thinking: whoever brings all their income, expenses and years of history into one system will see debts, errors and traps they never noticed before.