Most personal-finance and accounting apps ask you to connect your bank by entering your online-banking credentials into a third-party aggregator. You don’t have to. Every bank lets you download your own statements, and that’s all you need to keep accurate, categorized, tax-ready books. Here’s the workflow.
Bank-linking typically routes your credentials through a third-party aggregator and grants ongoing read access to your accounts. Importing statements yourself keeps your banking login between you and your bank, and means no service is continuously pulling your data.
It’s a download and an upload, usually once a month per account. In exchange you get full control over what data leaves your bank and when. Rules handle the categorization so the recurring effort is minimal.
PDF and CSV statements. Common layouts are parsed automatically, and AI-assisted extraction handles formats that don’t match a known template. CSV imports include a column-mapping step.