How to connect your bank account to Claude Cowork

Why use Cowork for money tasks

A chat answers a question. Cowork carries out a task: it plans the steps, calls tools, and leaves you with files. That fits the money jobs that end in an artifact:

• A budget spreadsheet built from three months of real spending.
• A folder of tax documents with a categorized transaction export.
• A monthly report you can reread next month and compare against.

Without a bank connection, every one of those starts with you downloading statements and dragging them into the task. With BankBridge enabled, Cowork pulls the transactions itself.

Setup in three steps

1. Link your bank. Sign up at bankbridge.money, subscribe, and connect your checking account and every card you spend on.
2. Add the connector on claude.ai. Go to Settings, Connectors, add a custom connector with the URL https://bankbridge.money/api/mcp, and sign in with your BankBridge email. The claude.ai setup page has a one-click button.
3. Enable it in Cowork. Open a Cowork task, open the tool picker, and switch BankBridge on. The Cowork setup page covers this step.

Connectors sync across claude.ai, Claude Desktop, mobile, and Cowork, so you only authorize once.

Your first Cowork task

Start with something small that confirms the connection and produces a file:

“List my connected bank accounts with current balances, then write a file called balances.md in my finance folder with a table of each account and a total.”

Cowork calls list_accounts, then writes the file. If the balances come back, every other tool will work.

Five tasks that suit Cowork

• Budget draft.“Average my spending by category over the last three full months, separate recurring bills from flexible spending, and save a budget spreadsheet with a cap per category.” See how to build a budget with Claude.
• Year-end export.“Export every transaction from last year to a CSV and a second CSV with totals by category.” Useful before meeting your tax preparer.
• Subscription audit.“Find every recurring charge, note when each started and whether the price went up, and save a list of ones I should review.”
• Monthly report.“Write a one-page report on last month: income, spending by category, the ten largest charges, and anything new.”
• Receipt matching. If your folder has receipts or invoices, ask Cowork to match each one to a card charge and list the charges with no receipt. See expense reports with an agent.

Keep a finance folder

BankBridge stores nothing, and a new task does not remember the last one. Give Cowork one folder for money work and keep the outputs there: your budget, last month's report, a notes file with rules like “the transfer to Jordan on the 1st is rent.” Then start each task with “read notes.md and budget.md first.” Next month's report can compare itself to this month's.