Hello Simplifi Team,
I wanted to take a few minutes to share my experience with Simplifi and offer some constructive feedback.
Over the past several weeks, I've evaluated a number of financial management and accounting systems, ultimately selecting Simplifi. I want to begin by saying that I'm extremely pleased with the product and what I've been able to accomplish with it.
My financial situation is relatively complex, involving approximately 30 accounts, including personal, investment, retirement, trust, and other financial accounts.
I was able to bring this substantial financial portfolio into Simplifi and begin reconciling it in approximately four hours. Considering the complexity, I found that quite impressive.
I subsequently spent approximately 30 hours reviewing, reconciling, and properly categorizing the underlying transactions. This involved identifying transfers, investment income, credit card payments, business expenses, personal expenses, and other financial activity.
During that process, I developed several observations that I believe could help improve an already excellent product.
1. Automatic Transaction Categorization
While Simplifi's automatic categorization is useful, I found that it frequently required corrections, particularly with more complex financial transactions.
Investment dividends, transfers, reimbursements, and other transactions were not always categorized appropriately.
I recognize that automatic categorization is challenging, especially across different financial institutions. Nevertheless, I believe there is considerable room for improvement.
Ideally, the system should learn from corrections and become progressively more accurate without requiring users to repeatedly address similar transactions.
2. Simplifi's Artificial Intelligence
I believe the addition of AI to Simplifi is an excellent step forward.
However, during my reconciliation process, I found that its capabilities were somewhat limited when dealing with more complex questions and multi-step activities.
For approximately 30 hours, I worked extensively with ChatGPT to guide me through the reconciliation and categorization process.
ChatGPT demonstrated a strong understanding of Simplifi's functionality and helped me systematically identify problems, develop appropriate categorization procedures, and work through a large volume of transactions.
The difference in capabilities was noticeable.
Simplifi's AI was helpful with relatively straightforward activities, but it sometimes struggled with more complicated matters.
ChatGPT was generally much more capable of understanding the broader objective, maintaining context, and helping me work through the steps necessary to accomplish it.
I would strongly encourage your development team to explore whether a more capable AI system, potentially incorporating OpenAI's technology, could be integrated into Simplifi.
My experience suggests that this could substantially improve the product's usefulness, particularly for individuals who do not have financial or accounting backgrounds.
The objective should be for users to explain what they want to accomplish in ordinary language and have the AI guide them through the process—or, where appropriately supported and authorized, perform the necessary actions.
3. Moving Beyond Financial Reporting
One of the more interesting things that emerged from my experience is the opportunity to use Simplifi for something broader than tracking income and expenses.
Through our family foundation, we are developing an educational initiative called Borrowed Wisdom, intended to help young adults make better decisions in their everyday lives.
A central part of this initiative involves personal financial management.
Our philosophy is relatively simple:
Your Life. Your Data. Your Decisions. Your Education.
Rather than attempting to teach young people financial management through hundreds of pages of generalized information, we want to provide individualized guidance based on their actual financial circumstances.
For example, someone shouldn't need to understand accounting to recognize that they're spending more money than they're earning.
They should be able to connect their bank accounts and credit cards to a system that automatically identifies their financial activity, anticipates upcoming obligations, and alerts them to potential problems before those problems become serious.
We envision something similar to the dashboard in an automobile.
Green means things are proceeding normally.
Yellow indicates that something requires attention.
Red identifies a situation requiring action.
More importantly, the system should explain what is happening, why it matters to that particular individual, and what choices are available.
We call this concept Learning at the Moment of Need.
The individual learns what is relevant to their circumstances at the time they need that knowledge.
4. A Potential Role for Simplifi
At this point, Simplifi appears to be an excellent platform for collecting and organizing the financial data necessary to support this concept.
I have already selected it for my own family financial management system, which will eventually encompass seven family members.
However, for a broader educational application such as Borrowed Wisdom, I believe a more sophisticated AI capability would be essential.
We don't want individuals spending hours categorizing transactions or learning how to operate financial software.
We want the system to do as much of that work as possible, allowing people to concentrate on understanding their financial circumstances and making better decisions.
The underlying principle is:
Identify the issue. Explain the consequence. Present the choices. Let the individual decide.
I believe Simplifi could be well-positioned to participate in something like this.
5. An Opportunity for Discussion
I would welcome an opportunity to share more about my experience and the direction we're exploring with Borrowed Wisdom.
I am not suggesting that Simplifi needs to become an educational platform. Rather, I believe its financial data aggregation and management capabilities, combined with a more advanced conversational AI system, could provide an excellent foundation.
I would be particularly interested in understanding whether your product development team is exploring more sophisticated AI integration, including the possibility of working with OpenAI technology.
Again, I want to emphasize that my experience with Simplifi has been very positive. I'm offering these observations because I believe the product has considerable potential beyond its current capabilities.
Thank you for developing an excellent product. I look forward to seeing how it continues to evolve.
Joseph D. SetaJoseph and Karen Seta Foundation
Borrowed Wisdom Initiative
