The standard advice for starting a budget is "connect your bank." That advice quietly assumes an aggregator covers your bank. For a large share of the world it does not — and the people it fails hardest are the ones who most need a consolidated view, because their accounts are spread across countries.
You do not need a bank connection. Every bank produces a statement, and a statement contains exactly the same information a sync would deliver. This guide covers how to work from statements properly, in the order you should try the formats, and what changes about your workflow when you do.
Try the formats in this order
Not all exports are equal. Work down this list and stop at the first one your bank offers — each step down costs you a little more accuracy or effort.
- OFX / QFX / QBO. Purpose-built financial interchange formats. Amounts, dates, and descriptions are already structured fields, so nothing has to be inferred. If your bank offers this, take it and stop reading this section.
- CSV / XLSX. Nearly universal where a web portal exists. Structured, but column names and date formats vary wildly between banks, so you will map columns once per account.
- PDF statement. The true universal — every bank emails one, and many home-country banks offer nothing else. Text has to be extracted and reassembled into rows, which is where quality varies between tools.
- Screenshot of the banking app. The genuine last resort, and more necessary than it should be: a meaningful number of banks offer no export at all, only a screen. Accuracy is lowest here, so verify totals after import.
Password-protected PDFs: check where the password goes
Banks outside the sync-friendly countries very often send statements encrypted, with a password derived from your date of birth, account suffix, or PAN. This is a security question worth being fussy about.
There are two ways a tool can handle it. It can ask you to type the password and send it to a server to unlock the file there — which means your statement password now exists on someone else's infrastructure. Or it can decrypt in your browser and upload only the already-plaintext bytes, so the password never leaves your machine. The second is straightforwardly better and there is no functional trade-off. Ask which one you are getting; the answer is rarely on the pricing page.
Either way, one rule holds regardless of tool: a statement password is not a banking password. Never hand a budgeting tool your actual bank login credentials to "fetch statements for you." A legitimate import path never needs them.
What changes in your workflow
Working from statements has one real cost and two underrated benefits.
The cost is cadence. Sync updates daily; statements arrive monthly. So you will be reconciling a month at a time rather than glancing at a live feed. In practice this suits budgeting better than it sounds — monthly is the natural period for a budget anyway, and a daily feed mostly produces anxiety rather than decisions. Set a recurring 20-minute appointment with yourself for the day after statements land.
The first benefit is coverage: every account you have, including the ones no aggregator reaches, in one ledger. A complete picture beats a live partial one.
The second is durability. Bank connections break — re-authentication expires, banks change APIs, aggregators drop institutions. Every long-term sync user has had a month silently go missing. A statement is a file; it imports the same way in five years.
A realistic first-month workflow
| Download last month's statement from each account | ~5 min |
| Import and map columns (first time only, per account) | ~5 min |
| Review auto-categorisation, fix what is wrong | ~10 min |
| Check the imported closing balance against the statement | ~1 min |
Month two onwards is the first and last rows plus a quick category scan — the column mapping and most category rules are already learned. The balance check at the end is the step people skip and should not: it is the only thing that catches a mis-parsed row.
Two things to verify after every import
- Closing balance matches the statement. One number, five seconds, catches nearly every parsing error including duplicated or dropped rows.
- Transaction count matches. Most statements print one. If the count is right and the balance is right, the import is right.
If you import overlapping date ranges — easy to do when a statement period straddles a month — check that the tool deduplicates rather than double-counting. Importing the same week twice is the most common way a statement-based ledger goes wrong.
How Orbiq does this
This is the vendor section; the method above works with any tool that supports these formats.
Orbiq is built import-first rather than sync-first, because it was written for exactly the banks aggregators skip. It accepts PDF statements, CSV, XLS/XLSX, OFX/QFX/QBO, and images (PNG, JPG, WEBP, HEIC) for the screenshot path. Password-protected PDFs are decrypted in your browser using a WebAssembly build of MuPDF — the password never crosses the network, and the server only ever receives plaintext bytes.
Imported rows are auto-categorised, and corrections become rules, so the review step shrinks each month. Indian statement codes that generic parsers choke on — TDS, WTax, SIP, dividend lines — are read directly. Amounts keep their original currency and the exchange rate from their own date, which is what makes a statement-built ledger usable across currencies rather than just within one.
Direct bank sync exists as an option, but it is never the only path and no plan requires a bank login. Native sync covers Canada and the US only, through Plaid, on Orbiq Connect. Beyond those two countries it is bring-your-own-key: you open your own account with LunchFlow, a separate company that bills you directly on top of Orbiq, and paste your key into Orbiq Core. Pricing is flat CAD — Core at CAD 9/month, Connect at CAD 15/month — with a 30-day trial and no card required.
Related reading: importing bank transactions without handing over a password, what to look for in a multi-currency budgeting app, and budgeting when your life spans two countries.