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Automations

An Automation is a job you give Lucius once and he repeats on his own — every morning, every Monday, every six hours, or whenever a transaction posts. Each run is an ordinary Lucius conversation: same tools, same permissions, and you can open it afterwards and carry on talking.

Typical uses: a Daily briefing each morning, a Weekly report on Mondays, syncing your bank every few hours, or logging the purchases in your card emails.

Set one up from a template (quickest)

  1. Open Automations in the sidebar.

  2. Under Recommended, click a template:

    TemplateWhat it doesWhen
    Auto-log transactions from emailReads bank, card and trade confirmation emails and logs them — payees resolved, nothing double-bookedEvery 12 hours
    Daily briefingA short, friendly update on yesterday’s money and investmentsEvery day at 9:00
    Weekly reportHow last week went: spending, bills, investments and anything unusual — as a designed report pageMondays at 8:30
    Monthly reportHow last month went: what you earned and kept, spending and investmentsThe 1st of each month at 9:30

  3. The editor opens with everything filled in. Change the name, wording or time if you like.

  4. Click Create automation. Nothing is saved or run until you do.

The briefing and reports are sent to you on Telegram, or by webhook if that’s what you use; with neither set up, they appear in the app.

Other templates on the same page:

  • Sync a connector — one per bank or broker connector (Sync SimpleFIN, Sync Plaid, Sync Lunch Money, Sync Lunch Flow, Sync YNAB, Sync Enable Banking, Sync Alpaca, Sync Interactive Brokers). Each fetches new activity on a schedule and books it. You can also start these from the Automate button on the connector’s own page.
  • Start from a template — Subscription creep, Budget pacing, Cash floor guard, Large charge alert; Browse all templates adds New payee check and Portfolio drift.

Looking for the daily portfolio digest? The scheduled “Daily Portfolio Digest” that used to be switched on in Settings → Intelligence has been removed. The Daily briefing template does that job now — and you can read, edit, pause or delete it like any other Automation.

Set one up yourself

  1. In Automations, click New automation, then:
    • Create with Lucius — opens a chat where Lucius asks what it should do and when, then shows you a draft (Confirm Lucius’s draft) to check before anything is created; or
    • Set up manually — opens an empty editor.
  2. Name — anything you’ll recognise.
  3. Instructions — what Lucius should do each time it runs, written the way you’d ask a person: “Summarize my spending since the last run and send it to me.” Leave out when — that’s the next step, and keeping it out of the text means the instructions stay right if you change the schedule later.
  4. When it runs — set the trigger in the fields under the instructions (see Triggers). The line above them reads it back as a sentence.
  5. In the toolbar under the instructions, pick the approval mode (Manual, Auto or Skip — see Approval mode), and optionally a Model and an effort (Low effort, Medium effort, High effort).
  6. Click Create automation.

To check it works straight away, open its ⋮ menu and choose Run now, then open the run from its History tab.

Times use the time zone in your profile.

Triggers

Under When it runs in the editor, choose Schedule or Event. The trigger is the only place an Automation’s timing lives: each run is told which trigger woke it (with the names of the accounts and payees it points at) and when the Automation last ran to completion, so instructions like “since the last run” work whatever schedule you pick.

Schedule — Repeats
ManualOnly when you click Run now (or ask Lucius to run it)
Hourly, Daily, Weekdays, Weekly, MonthlyWith On / On the / At for the day and time
Once, on a dateA single run at a date and time
CustomAn unusual pattern — picking it (or Create via Lucius for a custom cadence) hands the timing to Lucius in chat
Event (what happens)Options
A transaction postsAny number of conditions (below) — or none, to run on every transaction
A balance crosses a thresholdAccount, Drops below / Rises above, Amount
A price movesTicker — any ticker on the market, not only ones you hold — then Falls below a price, Rises above a price, Falls more than %, Rises more than % or Moves more than % (either way), and a Threshold

A transaction trigger is a list of conditions. Choose + Add condition, pick a field, then what to check it for:

FieldChecks
Accountis / is not one or more of your accounts — either side of a transfer counts
Kindis / is not one or more of Expense, Income, Transfer, Investment, Investment: buy, Investment: sale or Adjustment — Investment covers both a buy (cash leaving the account) and a sale (cash arriving)
Amountover / under a figure — the size of the transaction, whichever way the money moved
Payeeis / is not one or more of your payees (a transaction with no payee, such as a transfer, is never “not” one either)
Description (the bank’s text)contains, doesn’t contain, starts with, matches regex
Memo (your note)contains, doesn’t contain, starts with, matches regex

Account, Kind and Payee take several values: each pick shows as a chip under the box (× removes it), and with two or more the condition reads is any of / is none of — “Payee is any of Grab, Uber” runs on either. Contains and doesn’t contain take several phrases separated by commas — any one of them counts (grabfood, ubereats, kestreleats). Matching ignores upper and lower case. Every condition has to match for the Automation to run.

Conditions that can never all be true are flagged in red and the Automation can’t be saved until you fix them: a transaction has one payee and one kind, so two separate Payee is (or Kind is) conditions with different values never both hold — put both values in one condition instead. The same goes for Amount over a figure at or above an Amount under one, and for an is whose every value an is not rules out. Two Account is conditions are fine: a transfer between those two accounts matches both. A trigger set up before conditions existed, with filters the list can’t show, appears as Custom with its exact filters — ask Lucius to change it.

Amounts are in the currency they are really compared in, shown next to each amount box: a transaction amount with an Account is condition naming exactly one account is in that account’s currency; on any account, or on any of several, in your base currency; a balance threshold is in its account’s currency; a price is in the ticker’s own quote currency (D05.SI in SGD, AAPL in USD).

Ticker searches the whole market as you type, with the instruments already in your book listed first. Similar tickers are easy to mix up — DBS trades as D05.SI in Singapore and as DBSDY over the counter in the US — so once you pick one, a card under the box shows what it really is: its name, exchange, currency and last price. If it’s the wrong one, choose Not this one? Search again. A ticker Lucius saves for you is looked up the same way.

For an event, Run sets how matches turn into runs — nothing that matches is ever dropped:

  • each time — a run for every match, one after another.
  • at most once an hour — the first match runs right away; anything later in that hour waits and arrives together in one run once the hour is up.
  • at most once a day — the same, over 24 hours.

The window counts from the last run, not the clock. Grouping costs fewer runs than each time.

When a schedule runs out — a Once Automation has run, or a custom schedule reached its end — the Automation moves to the collapsed Finished section below your list. That isn’t the same as Paused, which is only ever your choice. To run a finished one again, choose Edit to run again and give it a new date or schedule. Clear finished deletes all of them, with their run history, after you confirm.

Approval mode

Each Automation has its own approval mode. Inside a run, it decides — not the mode of any chat.

ModeIn a run
Manually approvePauses on every change and waits for your approval on a confirm card. The run’s conversation shows Needs you.
Automatically approveRuns on its own. Still pauses for the two riskiest operations: deleting a filtered set of transactions, and re-applying a payee rule across your whole ledger.
Skip all approvals“Lucius never pauses, even for unsafe actions.” Including those two. Use it only for an Automation you’ve tested.

The Recommended and Sync a connector templates start in Automatically approve — there’s nobody at the screen at 9am to tap a card. A new Automation you set up yourself starts in Manually approve.

In every mode:

  • A tool set to Blocked is refused.
  • A tool you explicitly set to Needs approval on a connector’s page still asks.
  • Tools from an external MCP server ask unless set to Always allow.
  • An Automation can’t create, change, delete or run Automations without asking you.
  • An Automation never approves its own transactions. Rows it logs land in your review queue (N to review in Accounts), and only you can approve them — even in Skip all approvals. It can still edit or re-flag those rows.

An Automation never borrows your chat permissions. In Manually approve, even a tool you’ve set to Always allow elsewhere pauses — unless it’s on this Automation’s own Always allowed list. Tapping Always allow on a card during a run adds the tool to that list. To see or remove those, open the Automation: the Always allowed section lists each tool with a Revoke button.

Details on levels and modes: Permissions.

Managing your Automations

Each Automation’s ⋮ menu has Run now, Pause / Resume, Edit, Duplicate and Delete. Click an Automation to open it: Setup shows its instructions, trigger, model, Permission Mode, Cost & usage and Always allowed list; History lists every run.

Each run is a conversation. You’ll also find them in the Lucius history list under Automation runs; Mark all read there clears the unread ones in one click.

A run that failed keeps saying Failed there, even after you’ve opened it. And while an Automation’s latest run has failed, the Lucius home screen lists it under Needs attention — on your phone too — with the reason. Open takes you to the run, where Try again is. It drops off the list once a later run, or your retry, succeeds — and after 24 hours in any case, so a paused or finished Automation doesn’t sit there for good.

Deleting an Automation also deletes its run history. It can’t be undone.

Logging transactions from your email

Auto-log transactions from email is in Recommended, and behind the Automate button on the Email connector’s page. Every 12 hours it reads new bank, card and trade confirmation emails, logs what it finds and messages you a summary. Each run reads the mail since the last run that finished (at least a day’s worth), so a slower schedule or a failed run never leaves a gap. It follows the built-in log-transactions-from-email skill, so when that skill improves, your Automation does too (unless you’ve edited the skill).

It needs the Email connector set up first; without a mailbox, the run says so and stops without logging anything. Running it twice over the same email never books it twice.

Older installs may have a paused copy of this Automation that was added automatically. It’s yours to edit, turn on or delete — a deleted copy doesn’t come back.

Cost

A run costs the same as the same conversation in chat, on the Automation’s Model (or your default). Each Automation’s Cost & usage shows what it has spent, the list can be sorted by Cost this month, and runs appear in Settings → Cost & Performance — see Models and cost.

Before you let one run unattended

An unattended run can do anything a conversation you’re watching can. What protects you is the permission level of each tool it might use, plus the approval mode you pick. Check both before pointing an Auto or Skip Automation at anything that changes your money.

Open Net Worth has to be running (and the computer awake) for a scheduled run to happen.

Troubleshooting

It didn’t run. Check it isn’t Paused or Finished, that Open Net Worth was running at the time, and look at its History tab. More in A scheduled Automation didn’t run.

A run is stuck on “Needs you”. It’s in Manually approve and waiting on a confirm card. Open the run and answer it, or switch the Automation to Automatically approve.

“This turn hit its 20-minute time limit and was stopped.” The model was too slow for the job. Pick a faster Model for this Automation, or raise the Turn time limit — see Models and cost.

“Set the … below.” The trigger is missing something it needs — an account, a time, a threshold. Fill it in under When it runs.

The briefing or report shows up in the app instead of on my phone. Set up Telegram (or a webhook) — the templates send there when one exists.