How to track your spending without linking your bank

Many budgeting apps start by asking for your bank login. They need it to pull your transactions automatically. That’s convenient, but it means a third party can see every payment you make, and the connection often breaks.

You don’t need any of that to understand your spending. A few minutes a week of honest logging tells you more than an automatic feed you never look at. Here’s how we approach it in Shadowkit’s Money skill. The ideas work in any app or even on paper.

1. Set up the accounts you actually use

Start with where your money lives: a current account, a savings account, the cash in your wallet, a credit card. In Shadowkit each account has a type (Bank, Savings, Cash or Card), its own currency, and an opening balance. The opening balance can be negative, which is how you’d start a credit card that already has a balance on it.

Keep it to the accounts you touch every month. You can always add more.

2. Log as you go, in seconds

The habit that matters is logging right after you pay, while you still remember what it was. In Shadowkit, Money’s page on Home has Expense and Income buttons right under your balance, so there’s nothing to open first. Pick an amount, a category and an account, and you’re done.

Moving money between your own accounts is a transfer, not spending. Paying off a card or moving cash to savings doesn’t count as income or expense, and it doesn’t skew your charts.

3. Use categories for the big picture and tags for the details

Categories answer “what kind of spending was this?”: Food, Transport, Bills, Home and so on. Every transaction has one. You can rename them, add your own, archive the ones you don’t use, or merge two into one.

Tags answer the questions that cut across categories, like “how much did the holiday cost?” or “what do I spend on the kids?”. One transaction can carry several tags. In the overview you can break spending down by category or by tag for the week, month or year.

4. Import your bank’s CSV when you want to catch up

Almost every bank lets you download a statement as a CSV file. If you’ve fallen behind, importing it is faster than typing. Shadowkit’s import is a guided mapper with three steps:

Match columns. It guesses which column is the date, the amount and the description, and you correct it. It handles a single signed amount column or separate Debit and Credit columns, and it can flip the signs if your bank writes spending as positive.
Match values. It maps the names in your file to your accounts, categories and tags, or creates new ones.
Review. It skips rows you’ve already imported and lists any rows it couldn’t read.

The import is all or nothing, so you never end up with half a file. You can undo it as one batch, and it remembers your mapping for the next statement from the same bank.

The file is read on your phone. Nothing is uploaded, and no one gets your bank login.

5. Handle more than one currency honestly

If you get paid in one currency and spend in another, create both. One is your main currency, and totals show in it. You type in the exchange rates yourself, so they’re the rates you actually got. Shadowkit doesn’t fetch rates from the internet; it works offline. A transfer between accounts in different currencies suggests the received amount, and you can change it to match what the bank really gave you.

6. Look at it once a week

Open the overview, look at the chart, and ask one question: was there anything I didn’t expect? That’s the whole practice. Over a month or two you’ll know where your money goes better than any automatic feed could tell you.

Keep a backup

Your data lives on your phone, so keep a copy. Shadowkit can export a JSON backup of your money at any time, which you can save wherever you like and restore later, merging it in or replacing everything. With Pro you can also export CSV for a spreadsheet, or a PDF report with totals, every category and every transaction.

Want the bigger picture? Start with Meet Shadowkit.