The problem with asking software about your money
Most finance tools give you charts and leave the interpretation to you. If you want to know why a month looks worse than the one before it, you filter, sort, export, and eventually build a pivot table. The answer was always in the data, it just took twenty minutes to reach.
The obvious fix, pointing a language model at your data and letting it talk, has a worse failure mode. A model asked for a total will happily produce one that looks plausible and is wrong, and you have no way to tell the difference from the answer alone.
How Ask Karchu works
Your question is matched to a set of deterministic lookups: totals by category, totals by merchant, transactions above a threshold, period comparisons, recurring charges, unusual amounts. Those lookups run as ordinary database queries scoped to your workspace, and they return real rows and real sums.
Only then does the wording step happen. The model receives the computed figures and the matching rows and writes the sentence around them. It never sees a raw statement file, it cannot run its own query, and it cannot reach another organization's data.
The answer is shown with the number, the date range it covers, how many transactions it is based on, and a link to view those transactions. When a question matches nothing, Karchu says the search returned nothing rather than filling the gap.
Questions people actually ask
Why did my expenses go up this month. What did I spend on software. Show transactions over one thousand. What subscriptions am I paying for. Which vendors cost me the most. Compare this month with last month. What were my largest expenses. Which expenses look unusual. How much did I spend on a specific client.
Each of these maps to a lookup that already exists in Karchu, which is why the answers are consistent. Ask the same question twice and you get the same number.
What it will not do
It will not give you tax or investment advice, it will not predict a number it cannot derive from your data, and it will not answer about a workspace you are not a member of. Forecasts are handled separately and are always labelled as estimates.
Frequently asked questions
What is Ask Karchu?
Ask Karchu is a question and answer view over the statements you have already uploaded. You type a question in plain language, such as "what did I spend on software last quarter", and Karchu answers from your own transactions, with the supporting rows listed underneath so you can check the number yourself.
Does Ask Karchu make up numbers?
No. Every figure comes from a lookup over your own transaction rows, not from a language model guessing. The model is only used to phrase the answer, and it is given the computed totals and the matching rows. If nothing matches your question, Karchu says so instead of producing a number.
Can it see other people's data?
No. Every question runs against the workspace you are signed in to, and membership is checked on the server before any data is read. Transactions from another organization are never loaded, and no raw file is sent anywhere.
What kind of questions can I ask?
Totals and comparisons (this month against last month), category and merchant questions, transactions above an amount, recurring charges and subscriptions, largest expenses, unusual transactions, and spend tied to a specific client or project when you tag transactions that way.
Which plan includes Ask Karchu?
Ask Karchu is available on the Pro, Business and Enterprise plans. The Starter plan includes upload, categorization, dashboards and CSV export.