· 6 min read
How to track your finances without connecting your bank
Handing your online banking credentials to an app isn't the only way to keep your finances current. With a simple method, tracking things yourself costs less time than people expect, and leaves you in full control of your data.
1. Fix a starting point, not your whole history
Don't try to migrate five years of transactions. Note today's balance for each account, the outstanding balance on each loan and the value of your investments and other assets. That already gives you today's net worth, which is what matters to get started.
2. Automate everything that repeats
Salary, mortgage, rent, utilities, insurance and subscriptions make up most of a month's entries and don't change. Set them up once as recurring transactions and they appear on their own, saving you time every month.
- Fixed income and loan instalments
- Utilities and insurance, with their real frequency
- Subscriptions, which stop going unnoticed once they're listed
3. Import your statement as a CSV once a month
Every bank lets you download a CSV statement. Pick one fixed day a month, download and upload the file: transactions are created with their date, description and amount, and categorization rules assign the category.
4. Let rules handle the categorizing
A rule links a piece of text in the description, or a transaction type, to a category. With fifteen or twenty rules in place, most months need almost no manual sorting at all.
5. Reconcile and close the month
Compare the balance you calculated with your bank's balance. If they match, the month is complete and your net worth figure is reliable; if not, the gap tells you exactly what's missing. This monthly close is what no automatic sync forces you to do — and it's exactly what makes your numbers trustworthy.
Frequently asked questions
- How much time does this really take?
- With recurring items automated and a monthly import, ten to twenty minutes a month, almost all of it spent reviewing and reconciling.
- What do I gain compared with a bank aggregator?
- You don't hand over credentials or standing permissions on your accounts, you're not exposed when your bank changes something and breaks the connection, and you control exactly what gets recorded.