Why so many budget apps want your bank login
Most modern budget apps make money from convenience: transactions appear automatically. To do that, they connect to your bank through a data aggregator. Depending on the bank, that means either a token-based connection or handing your banking username and password to a third party that logs in on your behalf.
For a lot of people this is fine. For others it's a deal-breaker:
- You don't want another company holding a detailed record of every purchase you make.
- Your bank's terms may discourage sharing credentials with third parties.
- Connections break. Banks change their login flows and sync silently stops.
- Your bank or country isn't supported at all.
The alternative: statement import
Almost every bank lets you download your transactions as a CSV or Excel file from online banking. That file contains everything a budget needs: date, description and amount. Money Map is built around this workflow, so you never connect it to your bank.
How importing works in Money Map
- In online banking, export your transactions as CSV or XLSX.
- Open Money Map and import the file.
- Map the columns once: date, description, and either a single amount column or separate debit and credit columns.
- Save the mapping as a template for that bank. Next time, it's one click.
- Re-importing an overlapping period is safe, because duplicates are skipped.
- Your auto-categorization rules sort the new transactions into categories.
Done weekly or monthly, this takes a few minutes, and you get a short look at your spending each time.
Try it before you buy
The demo runs in your browser with sample data. No signup, no email.
$19 for the first 50 buyers with code FOUNDER, then $29 one-time. 14-day refund window.
Finding the export button at your bank
Every bank labels it differently, but the option is usually in the same few places:
- Open an account's transaction history and look for Download, Export or a small download icon.
- Pick a date range. A full month works well, and overlapping ranges are fine because duplicates are skipped.
- Choose CSV or Excel (XLSX). Avoid PDF statements, which are made for printing rather than importing.
- Some banks put exports under Statements or Documents rather than in the transaction list.
Once you've imported a bank's file and saved the template, you won't need to think about its column layout again.
No bank login and no cloud either
Some apps skip bank linking but still store your data on their servers. Money Map goes further: it's a single HTML file that runs from your own disk (file://) in your browser. There's no account to create and no server to send data to. Transactions are stored locally in your browser on your computer.
What you get once your data is in
- Budget vs actual for every category.
- Envelope rollover or monthly reset, your choice of how unspent money behaves.
- Month-end forecast combining what you've spent, upcoming fixed costs and expected variable spending.
- Recurring expenses so rent, subscriptions and insurance are planned for.
- Encrypted backups (AES-GCM, passphrase-protected) you can store anywhere you choose.
Limits to know about
- No automatic sync, so new transactions appear only when you import them.
- No phone app. It runs in Chrome or Edge on Windows, which is where it's tested. Mac and Safari aren't tested.
- Your bank needs to offer a CSV or XLSX export. Most do.
Pricing
$29 one-time. The first 50 buyers get it for $19 with code FOUNDER. There's a 14-day refund window. Money Map is built by Sam Bolchen, a solo developer.