Budgeting without bank sync.

Most budgeting apps reach your transactions through a third-party aggregator that signs in on your behalf or holds an access token for your accounts. When it works, it is convenient. Plenty of careful people choose not to use it anyway:

• They would rather no company held ongoing access to their bank accounts, however well secured.
• Connections break. A bank changes its login page or a token expires, and transactions stop arriving until someone notices three weeks later.
• Their bank isn't covered. Aggregators reach some countries far better than others, and smaller banks and credit unions are often missing.
• They want a say in how their money is sorted, instead of cleaning up after an automatic import has filed a rent payment under shopping.

A statement sidesteps every one of those. You download it yourself, for the accounts you pick, when you decide to.

Someone has to download the files and upload them, which takes ten or fifteen minutes a month once you know where your bank keeps the button. Your figures also run a little behind. Upload once a month and the newest spending can be a few weeks old, and a card payment that is still pending won't be on the statement yet.

For a monthly budget that is rarely a problem, because the decisions you make with it are monthly too. Want a closer look mid-month? Download a fresh statement on the 15th, or add a big purchase by hand the day you make it.

Every bank hides the option somewhere slightly different. The route tends to look like this:

1. Sign in to online banking on a computer. Phone apps often hide the export or offer only a PDF.
2. Open the account and look for 'Statements', 'Download', 'Export' or 'Transaction history'.
3. Choose the date range, either one calendar month or your bank's own statement period.
4. Pick a format. CSV is a plain spreadsheet file that most tools read easily. PDF is the formatted statement you would get in the post.
5. Repeat for every account and credit card the household spends from, joint ones included.

If you keep separate accounts, both of you download from your own banks. You don't need every account, only the ones household money actually moves through.

A CSV is a table saved as text. Open one in any spreadsheet app and you get one row per transaction. Column names change from bank to bank, but every file has a date, a description and an amount somewhere.

Signs and columns.

Some banks use a single amount column where money out carries a minus sign. Others split it into a debit column for money out and a credit column for money in, leaving the unused one blank. They mean the same thing. If you are copying rows into a spreadsheet by hand, check that spending lands as spending and pay lands as income.

Which way round the date goes.

03/05/2026 means 3 May in most of the world and 5 March in the United States. Banks write dates the local way, and a spreadsheet that assumes the other order will quietly move rows into the wrong month. To check a file, find a date whose first number is above 12. If that number is the day, the whole file is day-first.

Keep it to one short session, ideally on the first weekend after payday or after your statements come out.

1. Download last month's statements for every account the household uses.
2. Import them into your budget and sort anything new into a category.
3. Reconcile: compare the closing balance on each statement with your own records.
4. Look at the month together. Which envelopes ran over, which had room left?
5. Set next month's amounts, starting from what you actually spent.

Reconciling is the step that makes the numbers trustworthy, and it is quicker than it sounds. If your records say the account should end the month at 1,240.50 and the statement agrees, every transaction is there. If they differ by 38.99, you know exactly what size of payment to look for.

On a statement, cash shows up only as an ATM withdrawal. The easy approach is to file every withdrawal under a ‘Cash’ category and accept not knowing exactly where it went. If you spend a lot in cash, jot down the bigger purchases instead.

A shared card or joint account is the simplest part of all, since its statement is the household's shared spending. Trouble starts when shared things get paid from personal cards and turn up scattered across personal statements. Agreeing which card is for shared spending saves a lot of hunting later.

A spreadsheet costs nothing and you control every cell. It is also where a lot of budgets stall, because copying and categorizing each line by hand is slow, and it always falls to whoever built the sheet.

We built Mitten around the statement method on purpose. Upload a PDF or CSV from your bank and Penny reads the statement you chose to upload. She gives every line a readable name and a category, asks before filing anything she is unsure of, and anyone in the household can edit or delete a row afterwards. The date order is worked out from every date in the file, so a month-first export and a day-first one both land in the right month. At no point does anyone hand over a bank login. Our security page sets out what Mitten can and cannot see, and the FAQ covers which files work best.

Setting up the budget itself for the first time? Start with how budgeting works, which explains envelopes and the methods for filling them.