OpenClaw User Builds Bank and Credit Card Statement Summarization Skills

A new OpenClaw user shared their experience building custom skills for financial statement processing. They self-hosted OpenClaw on a hardened server, using Haiku as the default model with Sonnet as a fallback, and didn't use any pre-existing ClawHub skills.

Skills Developed

The user built two skills entirely with OpenClaw:

• Bank Statement Summarizer: Categorizes transactions and generates reports.
• Credit Card Statement Summarizer: Categorizes transactions, detects breaks in statements, and generates reports.

Automation Features

Both skills automatically execute when:

• A new statement appears
• A new year directory is created
• A statement is moved, deleted, or updated

The system sends Telegram messages on report generation or regeneration, including the reason (e.g., "statement updated," "deleted," "new").

Development Details

The user reported development cost of "a little over $15," noting they spent too much time initially using Sonnet as the default model. Their only manual action is downloading new statements.

Lessons Learned

The user shared specific debugging insights:

• Use /new after each major step to avoid hitting Haiku's max token count
• Assume bugs exist and validate manually (e.g., missed transactions, incorrect category totals)
• Add reconciliation sections to reports comparing raw statement data to reported values

The user, a retired coder with decades of *nix and server-side experience, was initially skeptical but found value in the tool, noting that their coding experience wasn't useless in this context.