A spreadsheet works. It just costs an evening.
Count your own card. Five charges on an ordinary day is about 150 a month, and roughly 1,800 over a year. Add a current account and a second card and you are comfortably at double that.
None of it is hard. It is just long, it comes round again next month, and the first month you skip leaves a hole you only find when you are trying to answer a question.
- The category column drifts"Groceries" and "groceries" and "Grocery" become three rows in the pivot. The total is wrong in a way that looks right.
- One shop has six namesEvery prefix and reference number starts a new line, so your local cafe is scattered down the sheet and never reaches a top ten.
- Nothing spots a repeatA subscription that went from 30 to 45 is two ordinary rows eleven months apart. A sheet has no reason to put them next to each other.
- Two months in, it stopsThe sheet is only as current as the last evening you gave it. That is what makes it stale rather than wrong.
Why half the lines make no sense.
Your bank is not being careless. The name on a card charge is a billing descriptor, and it is usually capped at 22 to 25 characters. A long name turns up already chopped, before anyone has tried to read it.
Three things happen on the way to your statement, and none of them are about you.
- You get the processorA cafe taking payments through Square bills as SQ *NAME. The payment company comes first, and the shop is whatever survived.
- You get the parent companyThe name registered with the card network is often the group that owns the brand. It is not the name above the door, and it is not the one you would search for.
- You get the legal entityPlenty of shops bill under the company on their incorporation papers rather than the name on their sign.
So we strip the prefixes, the reference numbers and the padding, and we print the bank's line under ours. If we read it wrong, you can see that we read it wrong.
HOW IT WORKS
What happens when you drop the file in.
Drop the file in
The PDF or CSV your bank already sends you, straight out of your downloads folder. Nothing to connect, nothing to authorise.
We read it
SQ *BLUE BOTTLE COFFEE becomes Blue Bottle Coffee, in a category. Get one wrong and you fix it once.
Look at the year
By shop, by category, by month. The pivot table you keep rebuilding, already built.
The ones you forgot you were paying.
Subscriptions, bills and memberships end up in one list. Including the one that went from 30 to 45 in March and did not mention it, and the domain you renew once a year and never see coming.
Anthropic
Anytime Fitness
Namecheap
CORRECTIONS STICK
Fix a category once. Nothing overwrites it later, not a re-import and not a better guess we add next year.
CURRENCIES STAY APART
Every amount keeps the currency it was charged in. If a total would mix two, we tell you which one we counted.
YOU CAN LEAVE WITH IT
Export everything to CSV on the paid plan, with the bank's original text still in the file. Nothing is held hostage.