Budgeting Without Linking Your Bank
A budget needs your pay, your bills and your balances. They can arrive through a connection to your bank, or you can enter them yourself. This guide covers how a budget works without the connection: what it takes, what it gives up, and what it keeps private.
Published · Last updated · Part of the personal finance guide · How these guides are written
Two Ways a Budget Gets Its Numbers
Through a connection to the bank, or from figures you enter.
Linked
An app connects to the bank and brings in balances and transactions on its own. The budget is built from what has already happened: each purchase arrives and is sorted into a category.
Entered
You type in your pay, your bills and your balances, or import them from a spreadsheet. The budget is built from what is due: bills that haven't been paid yet, set against paychecks that haven't arrived yet.
Older than apps
Envelopes, notebooks and spreadsheets are budgets without a bank link, and many households still run one. Most banks also let customers download their transactions as a file, which a spreadsheet can read without any connection.
What Linking a Bank Involves
The connection behind an automatic budget, and what keeps it running.
How the connection works
Budgeting apps rarely connect to banks themselves. A data aggregator, a company in between, holds the connection: you sign in to the bank or approve access once, and the aggregator retrieves your balances and transactions from then on.
When it stops working
A connection can break when a bank changes its sign-in or its systems, and it then has to be approved again. Until it is, the budget shows figures from the last time it worked.
Small banks and credit unions are not always reachable, and accounts in other countries often are not.
What it costs
Aggregators charge the apps that use them for each connection, so linking carries a running cost for every account linked, paid one way or another by the people using it.
What Entering It Yourself Involves
The setup, the upkeep, and what a manual budget doesn't do.
The setup
How often you're paid and your take-home pay, your regular bills with their amounts and due dates, and what is in your accounts today. Recurring bills are entered once and repeat on their own.
The figures that change least are the ones a plan relies on most, so a budget can be useful well before every number is in.
The upkeep
Balances drift as money is spent, so they are only as current as their last update. Marking a bill paid, and updating a balance now and then, keeps the plan in step with the accounts.
A short weekly check-in is a common rhythm for a budget kept this way.
What it doesn't do
Nothing arrives on its own: purchases are not imported or sorted into categories, and spending is tracked only if it is written down.
For someone who wants a record of every purchase without typing it, that is the main thing a manual budget gives up.
What a Budget Without a Bank Link Keeps
Privacy, any account at all, and a plan that looks ahead.
Your bank sign-in stays yours
No company is given access to the account. The budget holds only the figures you choose to enter, which can be rounded, or left out entirely for an account you would rather not include.
Any account works
A credit union, an account in another country, a prepaid card or an envelope of cash all count the same way, because nothing has to connect to them.
There is also nothing to break: the figures stay where you put them.
A plan that looks ahead
A budget built from bills and paydays shows what is coming before it happens: which paycheck covers which bill, and how much is free in each pay period. See Budgeting by Paycheck.
How Manage Your Means Handles It
No bank connection, and the ways in and out it offers instead.
No bank connection
The application has no bank connection. Every figure is one you enter or import, and a new account starts with a few questions about your pay and your main bills that build its Cash Flow Planner.
Ways in and out
Figures can be entered in the application or filled into its Excel template and imported. Everything can be exported to Excel, downloaded whole, and deleted along with the account.
How it's kept
Names and amounts are encrypted where they are stored. There is no advertising, and no data is sold. The Privacy Policy and the Security page set out the details.
Put this into practice
A new account starts with a few questions about how often you're paid, your take-home pay and your main bills, and the Cash Flow Planner opens on them. No bank sign-in is asked for at any point.