Memories

Some things about your finances are not in your ledger. That the monthly transfer to a brokerage account is a child’s 529 contribution. That one card is always paid from one checking account. That a recurring payment is a sublet, not rent.

An agent cannot derive any of that from transactions. Memories are where you record it, and Purser serves them as context to whatever agent you connect.

Rules act, review flags ask, memories inform

That division is the whole design.

A memory never changes what lands in your ledger. No code path parses the text — there is no evaluator, no import hook, no scheduled job that reads one. The absence is deliberate: free-form text that acts would undermine the guarantee that only deterministic, user-declared boundaries decide anything.

If a nuance should actually do something, it belongs in a rule. Rules can cite the memory that motivated them, and archiving that memory never disables the rule — rules are the executable layer and must not change behavior because a note was tidied.

Where they show up

describe() carries a count plus your pinned few, so a fresh agent session is oriented without pulling everything.
list_memories fetches more on demand, filtered by account or payee.
The review loop attaches memories relevant to each row being reviewed.
The AI classifier, when configured, gets them as prompt context — which is what lets it act on “the monthly transfer to Fidelity is a 529 contribution” instead of guessing.

Relevance is exact, never fuzzy

A memory reaches a transaction only when one of its links is that transaction’s account, its category, or its payee. Foreign-key equality — no substring matching, no name similarity, no embeddings. A reviewer never receives a memory about a different account.

Memories with no links are global and apply everywhere.

One consequence surprises people, so it is worth stating: a memory linked only to a category cannot reach the classifier, because at categorization time the category is the thing being decided. Link to an account or a payee if you want the classifier to see it.

Drafts are never served

When an agent records a memory it lands as a draft, unless you asked it to remember something. Drafts appear in Config → Memories for you to approve, and are not served anywhere — not in describe(), not in listings, not to the reviewer, not to the classifier.

That is what stops an agent writing its own future context on its own say-so: a memory the agent decided to keep waits for your approval. The same gate applies to memories Purser writes itself, if you enable that.

There are caps for the same reason: 500 characters each, 100 active, 8 pinned, and 25 outstanding drafts. The draft cap is the flood valve — nothing can fill your inbox faster than you can empty it.

Budgets, because context is not free

A hundred memories is roughly twelve thousand tokens, which would swamp any agent’s context. So serving is bounded at every width: describe() carries at most 8 pinned rows and 1,000 characters, list_memories at most 25 rows and 2,500 characters, and the classifier prompt at most 5.

Every response reports exactly how much it truncated, so an agent always knows what it did not see rather than assuming it saw everything.

Privacy

Memory text is encrypted at rest alongside your payee names, descriptions and memos.

Reading memories needs the read scope and writing them write. With the purchase-privacy setting on, payee names inside a memory’s text reach an agent as references, like everywhere else (see Privacy and agents). An agent creates a memory as a draft unless you asked it to remember something: an active memory is context for every future session.

Archive, do not delete

Archiving is reversible and is the normal way to retire a memory. Hard deletion is admin-only and recoverable only for as long as your audit retention window keeps the record — your own prose is not derivable from anything else in the system, so Purser makes it hard to lose.

Purser never edits or archives your text on its own. A memory whose accounts were all closed is flagged stale and left exactly as you wrote it.