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The AI in your books

Thalermark’s AI isn’t a chatbot in the corner. It does three specific jobs, each woven into a screen you already use:

  • Reads receipts: start an expense from a photo and the photo turns into merchant, total, date, and a category, for you to review. (The model is sent a shrunken copy of the image; the receipt stored with your expense stays the full original.)
  • Suggests categories: the ✨ Suggest button on any expense.
  • Watches your cash flow: the What to watch notes on your dashboard, reading how money is moving and saying what’s worth knowing. Every observation is grounded in a real number from your own books.

The AI drafts and suggests; it never saves anything without you. And without a connection, nothing breaks. The app runs fine; those three features just sit out.

Worth knowing: the insights that are pure counting don’t use AI at all. Who to chase (late payers) and Unusual spending are arithmetic from your own records, so they’re built in, free, and work with no AI connected. The AI is reserved for the part that’s genuinely interpretation.

Connect it

Section titled “Connect it”

An owner or admin sets it up once for the whole workspace, in Settings → AI:

  1. Pick a provider: Anthropic, OpenAI, Ollama (local), xAI (Grok), or any custom compatible endpoint.
  2. Paste your API key (Ollama needs none; it runs entirely on your own machine).
  3. Click Verify. It tests the text model first, then the vision model that reads receipts, and tells you about each separately, so a typo’d key (or a model that can’t see images) fails here and not in the middle of your work.

Your key is stored encrypted and never shown again. Remove the connection and AI switches off for everyone; nothing already saved to your books changes.

Running a local model on modest hardware? The connection’s Advanced section has a Timeout setting (30 to 300 seconds): one number that gives a slow model longer to answer everywhere before the app gives up.