Track your spending without handing over your bank login

Almost every budgeting app opens the same way. Connect your bank. It's one button, it takes about thirty seconds, and most people press it without stopping to think. I don't think that's unreasonable, and for plenty of people it's a fair trade. But it's worth naming what the trade actually is.

What "connect your bank" really means

When an app syncs your account, there's a third-party aggregator sitting between you and your bank. It holds your credentials or your tokens, and your transaction history flows through servers you didn't choose, under a privacy policy you almost certainly didn't read.

The connection breaks, too. Go and read the reviews of any finance app and "sync is down" is somewhere near the top. And you can't narrow what it sees. It reads the whole account, not just the spending you meant to track.

Your bank already gives you your data

There's an export button in your online banking. It hands you a CSV of exactly the transactions you picked, and importing that file involves no third party, no stored credentials, and no standing connection that can leak or fall over.

The old objection was that CSV import is fiddly, and honestly, it was. Every bank names its columns differently. Some split debits and credits into two columns. Some write negatives in parentheses. That's a software problem though, and it's one we went and fixed. Whittle's import matches column aliases like Transaction Date and Posted Date, or Memo and Payee and Merchant. It collapses split debit and credit columns into a single signed amount, and it understands parenthesized negatives. You drop the file in and you get clean transactions out.

If you're coming from QuickBooks Self-Employed, the replacement guide walks through the whole move, CSV included.

What happens after the import

Imported rows are matched against expenses you already recorded, by amount and date, so nothing gets counted twice. Whatever's left over becomes a draft. The AI suggests a category, you can edit the description, and none of it touches your totals, your reports, or your tax exports until you approve it. If a transaction isn't a tax expense at all, it can go straight to your budget as a budget-only entry instead.

What you end up with is a monthly rhythm that takes a few minutes. Export from your bank, import the file, approve the drafts, done. Your credentials never left your bank's website.

This isn't a premium feature

It's the same reason the analytics here are built in-house and receipts are only ever served through an authorized request. Your financial life shouldn't quietly become somebody else's data product, and not doing that to you shouldn't cost extra.

If that's how you think about your money too, the 14-day free trial needs no card and will import your first CSV in about a minute.