One borrowed prompt found the gap. One line we added made it impossible to miss. AI Prompts, Reviewed is our new series. Each post takes one prompt or workflow from How I AI, Claire Vo's show where guests share their screens and walk through how they really use AI. We test it on a real small-business job, score it, and tell you what we'd change. Credit: Based on "How to Analyze Your Personal Finances Using the Perplexity Comet AI Browser Extension," a workflow from How I AI (hosted by Claire Vo, written up by the ChatPRD team), from the episode with Anish Acharya, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Original workflow: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/how-to-analyze-your-personal-finances-using-the-perplexity-comet-ai-browser-extension. Full episode: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/ai-for-music-videos-book-cataloging-and-personal-finance What the original does Anish points an AI browser assistant at his own investment account and asks a narrow, read-only question. The written workflow turns that into a tight prompt. Stick to what's on the page. Show beginning and ending values, deposits, withdrawals and fees. Never trade, move money, or recommend anything. Our favorite line is seven words long: "Cite the page section for every figure." The test We built a composite 30-day statement for a three-chair barbershop. 76 transactions: Square deposits, booth rent over Zelle, payroll, rent, and two daily ACH debits from two different funders. Made-up numbers, real-shaped problems. Run as written, the prompt did its job and still told the wrong story. Opening balance $2,912.18. Closing balance $28,695.93. Deposits $47,530.30. Every number cited. It looked like a monster month. It wasn't. $18,000 of those deposits was a new advance that hit on Sept 12, and $5,000 was the owner moving his own savings in. Strip both out and earned revenue was $24,530.30. The two funders pulled $8,214, which is 33.5% of everything the shop earned. Once the second advance started on Sept 14, debits ran $454 every business day: about $2,270 a week against roughly $5,724 in weekly sales. Close to 40%. Two NSF fees ($70) on Sept 2 and 3. Lowest balance: $156.91, the day rent cleared. Verdict: 7.5/10 Strengths: read-only, no advice, a source for every number. That's the discipline you want anywhere near a bank login. Weakness: it treats every dollar in as the same dollar. A funder's underwriter won't, and neither should you. Founder tweak: make it sort deposits into earned and not earned before it adds anything up. Then make it hunt for debits that repeat every business day. Copy the MCAFax version This is our own rewrite, not the original prompt. Copy the original from Anish Acharya's episode on How I AI: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/how-to-analyze-your-personal-finances-using-the-perplexity-comet-ai-browser-extension You are reviewing my business bank statement. Read only. Do not move money, log in anywhere, or give financial advice.
- Sort every deposit into: earned revenue (card settlements, customer payments), not revenue (transfers from my own accounts, loan or advance funding, refunds), or unclear. List the unclear ones for me.
- Total each group. Show the math.
- Find any debit that repeats on most business days or every week. Group them by payee with count, amount and total.
- Show those repeating debits as a % of earned revenue only.
- List NSF or overdraft fees with dates, plus the lowest daily balance and its date.
- For every number, quote the statement line it came from. If a line is cut off or missing, say so instead of guessing.
Paste it into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini with a statement export. CSV works best. Black out account numbers first. Before your next funding call Download last month's statement as a CSV, not a PDF screenshot. Run the MCAFax version and check three of its totals against the bank's own summary. Write your earned revenue on a sticky note. That's the number you quote, not the deposit total. Put every repeating debit into our cost calculator to see the real APR: https://mcafax.com/notebook/toolkit/cost-of-capital-calculator More on reading your own numbers: https://www.sba.gov/business-guide/manage-your-business/manage-your-finances