Budgeting without connecting your bank

01Why people look for this

Three reasons come up again and again, and only one of them is about privacy.

The connection kept breaking. A bank changes something on its side, the sync stops, and the ledger goes quietly stale until somebody notices in March that February is missing.

The coverage was never there. Aggregators reach the big names first. Smaller banks and regional ones are patchy or absent, and open banking is a legal obligation only in some places: in much of the world, Switzerland among them, a bank is under no obligation to open its data to anybody.

And handing over banking credentials, or a token that can read every transaction you make, to a company you met last week is a decision many people simply decline to make. That one needs no further justification.

02What you do instead

• Add an entry when it happens. It takes a few seconds on a phone, and it is the part that keeps you aware.
• Import your bank's export as it comes: a CSV from your bank, your card or an old spreadsheet, or a camt statement, the international ISO 20022 format many banks offer. Amounts are read whether they are written 1.234,56 or 1,234.56, so nothing has to be reformatted first.
• For an account you would rather not follow line by line, such as a broker or a crypto wallet, type the new total and let the app work out the movement that gets there.

03What it costs you, honestly

A few minutes a week, and the willingness to keep going through the months when nothing interesting happens. That is the whole price, and it is not nothing.

If you know you will not do it, an automatic app is the better tool for you, and we would rather write that here than take a month of your money to find out together.

04What you get back

Awareness, which is the point. A budget that fills itself is a report you read afterwards; one you fill yourself is a decision you make at the till.

Categories that match your life rather than a bank's guess at it. A birthday present bought at the supermarket is not groceries, a shared holiday paid by one person is not one person's spending, and only you know which is which.

And nothing to repair. There is no connection to break, so there is no morning where the app greets you with a re-authentication screen and three weeks of missing entries.

05Is it less accurate?

It fails differently. An automatic feed fails by being confidently wrong: it labels a transfer as income, or splits a card payment across two months, and the error is invisible because the total still looks plausible.

A hand-kept ledger fails by being incomplete, and an incomplete ledger announces itself: the balance in the app and the balance at the bank disagree. When they do, correct the total and the app records the difference as a movement, so the gap is closed and visible instead of silently averaged away.

06How Spendhog does it

Entries by hand or imported from a CSV or camt file, in any of 30 currencies side by side, with what the exchange cost you recorded as a cost rather than quietly disappearing. Budgets that understand a bill arriving every three months. Forecasts that refuse to project on less than two months of real history. And an assistant, off until you turn it on, that never sees a single transaction.

Thirty days free, no card, no bank login. The founder price is CHF 8.99 a month for the first 30 households to subscribe, and it stays for as long as the subscription does.