AI Prompt to Interpret and Use a Custom Financial Indicator You Track

What you need

You need a short description of the indicator and a few of its values over time. A custom indicator here means any figure or grouping you have defined yourself: a set of accounts you treat as one pot, or a number you watch such as liquid savings. In Sumio, it is a custom indicator you set up in the app.

The snapshot template on this page is optional. The prompt works from the indicator's own lines. Add the snapshot above it only when the indicator makes sense in relation to the rest of your money, for example as a share of your total assets.

Fill in these lines inside the prompt:

• Indicator: [name, and what it includes, e.g. "Emergency fund: current account plus savings account"]
• Values today, 12 months ago and 5 years ago: [amounts and currency, as far back as you have them]
• What I use it for: [a target, a limit, a comparison, or just watching it]

The definition line matters most. "Savings" can mean a single account or everything except property, and the model cannot tell which unless you write it down. If the indicator mixes currencies, give each part in its own currency and the exchange rate you used to add them up.

The third line decides the shape of the answer. An indicator with a target gets planning arithmetic; one you only watch gets help reading its trend. If you track your monthly spending, add it to the definition line, because many benchmarks are expressed in months of spending.

Here is my financial snapshot. Use only these numbers.

Currency: [e.g. EUR]
Date: [today's date]
Age: [optional]

ASSETS
[name] — [category: cash / stocks / ETFs / crypto / property / metals / other] — [value]
[name] — [category] — [value]
...

LIABILITIES
[name] — [type: mortgage / car loan / credit card / student loan / other] — [outstanding balance] — [interest rate if known]
...

CONTEXT (optional but improves the answer)
Monthly income after tax: [amount]
Monthly spending: [amount]
Amount I add to savings or investments each month: [amount]
Value of the same assets 12 months ago: [amount]

The prompt

Copy this exact text and paste it into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini directly beneath your snapshot block.

You are a personal finance educator. Help me understand and use a custom
financial indicator I track.

Indicator: [name, and what it includes]
Values today, 12 months ago and 5 years ago: [amounts and currency]
What I use it for: [target, limit, comparison, or watching]

1. Explain what this indicator measures and what it leaves out, based on my
   definition.
2. Describe how people commonly use an indicator like this: benchmarking
   against a rule of thumb, reading its trend, and planning scenarios.
3. Apply each of those to my figures. Show the arithmetic, and for scenarios
   use two or three simple what-ifs.
4. Describe the goals people typically set with indicators like this and the
   usual ways they are misread.
5. If my data is too thin for a meaningful answer, say so and suggest what to
   track next.

If my financial snapshot is above, use it only for context. Ask for any missing
figure rather than estimating it. Educational only: no buy or sell
recommendations and no products.

What good output looks like

A good answer starts by restating your definition and naming what falls outside it. An emergency fund that counts only bank accounts leaves out money market funds; one that counts a brokerage account includes money that can lose value just when you need it.

The benchmarking part uses rules of thumb, labels them as such, and shows the arithmetic. Say your emergency fund holds 150,000 CZK in a savings account and 3,000 EUR in cash, converted at 25 CZK per EUR, so 225,000 CZK in total. With monthly spending of 45,000 CZK it covers five months. A six-month target would be 270,000 CZK, a gap of 45,000 CZK, which saving 7,500 CZK a month closes in six months.

The trend section compares the 12-month and 5-year values and says how much of the change your own saving explains, if you gave enough detail to tell. The scenarios stay simple: spending rises by a tenth, income stops for three months, or the euro part loses 2% against the koruna, which takes 1,500 CZK off the total without you doing anything.

The pitfalls are specific to indicators you build yourself: counting the same money in two of them, mixing gross and net figures, and reading a currency move as saving progress.

What this can't tell you

The model knows your indicator only from the line you wrote. If the definition is vague, so is the answer, and it cannot check whether the parts add up to the total you gave.

Rules of thumb such as three to six months of spending in an emergency fund are general starting points. They ignore your income, job security and country, and the answer gives no tax or legal view for where you live.

Without browsing, a chat model has no live prices or exchange rates for anything inside the indicator, so values that include investments are frozen at the date you copied them. Redo the scenario arithmetic before relying on it.

Doing this without the retyping

In Sumio, this is the "Insights" prompt on a custom indicator, one of the 62 prompts built into the AI assistant. Custom indicators and the assistant are both part of Premium. It runs with one tap on an indicator you have already set up in the app, so you skip writing out its definition and its values by hand. Your records are stored on your device; the analysis sends the figures it needs to an AI provider.