Tarjetazo
A bot that reads my credit card statement and sends me the breakdown
Role: Creator
Rol: Creador
Overview
A small, self-contained automation that watches my inbox for the monthly BNA VISA statement, decrypts the password-protected PDF, extracts and categorizes every transaction, and sends a Telegram summary compared against the previous month. Built because reading a bank PDF every month to find out where the money went is exactly the kind of thing a computer should do.
The Challenge
The statement arrives as an encrypted PDF with no consistent structure, merchant names are cryptic strings, and the job runs unattended — so a silent failure means finding out months later that nothing was tracked.
The Approach
One module per step — email, PDF parsing, categorization, formatting, history, delivery — orchestrated by a main script that only commits state when every step passed. Categorization is rules-first with an LLM fallback so the API cost stays near zero, and known merchants persist to a local cache.
The Outcome
Running unattended on a cron every six hours. Every month I get a categorized breakdown with subtotals and a month-over-month comparison, without opening a single PDF.