AI categorisation, and how to turn it off
What AI does in KiwiBudget, what it never sees, and the switch that turns it off.
KiwiBudget sorts your transactions in two passes. First it checks them against our own list of New Zealand merchant patterns, which knows Pak’nSave, BP, Genesis, StudyLink and hundreds of others. That list is ours and runs on our own systems, so nothing leaves KiwiBudget for it.
Only what that list cannot place goes to Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI, which reads the description and sends back a category. For most people that is a small handful of transactions.
What gets sent, and what never does
The transaction description as your bank wrote it, for example "PAK’nSAVE DUNEDIN", plus the category rules you have made. A payment to or from another person can include their name, and some descriptions include an amount. Account numbers, card numbers and the name on your KiwiBudget account are taken out first, and your email, balances and banking login are never sent. Anthropic returns a category and does not use what we send to train its models.
Turning it off
- Open the app and go to Settings.
- Find the Privacy section.
- Switch off AI categorisation.
What changes when it is off
Nothing is sent to Anthropic for categorising your transactions, on any device. Our New Zealand merchant list still runs, and so do your own saved corrections, so most transactions are still sorted for you. Anything neither can place appears as "Other" and you can set the category with a tap.
That tap is worth doing. When you correct a category, KiwiBudget remembers it for that merchant and files it the same way from then on, so the app keeps getting more accurate without any AI at all.
You can switch it back on whenever you like, and the setting follows your account rather than the device you changed it on.
The other AI features
AI categorisation only runs when you tap Auto-categorise on the Transactions page; new transactions from your bank are sorted by the merchant list and your own corrections, without AI. The other AI features (Money Coach, the budget builder, reading an uploaded statement, grocery photo scans and the grocery list helper) also run only when you use them. Every AI feature asks first, on a screen that names Anthropic and lists what is sent, and nothing is sent until you allow it.
AI features come with the Student, Pro and Legend plans. The full detail is in our Privacy Policy.
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