Three ways to get transactions into a tracker
A spending tracker needs your transactions, and there are three ways to get them: let an app connect to your bank, type them in yourself, or upload the statements and exports your bank already gives you. Each trades convenience against how much access you hand over and how much work you do.
People skip the bank connection for different reasons. Some will not give a third party access to their accounts. Some bank where no aggregator reaches, or have accounts in several countries. Others connected once and had the sync stop working. If your budgeting app cannot import from your bank, see how statement upload covers banks a budgeting app does not support and accounts outside the US.
| Approach | Useful for | Tradeoff |
|---|---|---|
| Bank-linked aggregators | Transactions and balances that arrive on their own, where your bank is supported. | You authorize a connection to your bank, or share credentials, depending on the service. Coverage varies by bank and country. |
| Manual-entry apps | Recording exactly what you choose, with nothing connected. | Every payment is typed by hand, and a forgotten one leaves a gap. |
| Statement upload with review | Banks in any country that give you a supported file, with no bank login. | You upload new files and review them. Balances and spending are only as recent as the last file. |
What statement upload can and cannot do
Upload works from documents, so it reaches any bank that gives you a PDF, a CSV or a spreadsheet, including banks and countries that aggregators do not cover. It also leaves a trail: each imported transaction links back to the file it came from.
It cannot be live. A payment made after your latest statement is not there until you upload the next one, and there is no current balance. It suits a weekly or monthly review, not checking whether a payment went through this morning.
How it works in Pulget
Pulget uses the statement upload approach and never asks for bank credentials. You check what it reads before anything reaches your reports.
- Download a statement or transaction export from your bank or card provider, or use a spreadsheet you keep yourself.
- Upload it to the account it belongs to. Pulget reads scanned PDFs with OCR and spreadsheets with tabular readers, then extracts the transactions.
- Review the editable line items and correct anything that was read incorrectly. Corrections are reused when the same merchant or description appears again.
- Approve the reviewed transactions into your ledger. A row the account already holds is skipped, so overlapping statements do not count twice.
Accounts in different currencies each keep their own, and reports convert them into one; multi-currency expense tracking explains how.
Start with one account and one month
Create the account with its currency, upload last month's statement, and go through the review. That first pass shows how well Pulget reads your bank's layout before you add the rest. After that, a monthly routine is enough: download each account's statement, upload it, review, approve.
Files and limits
Pulget reads PDF, DOCX, CSV, XLS and XLSX files, and scanned PDFs through OCR. Photos and screenshots are rejected.
- Standard: 5 MB per file.
- Pro: 10 MB per file.
Page, row, and monthly upload limits also depend on your plan. Compare all plan limits.
Pulget runs in the browser; there is no mobile app. Uploading and reviewing files still takes some effort.
Questions
Is it safer than linking my bank?
It avoids sharing bank credentials or authorizing a bank connection. You still upload financial documents, which Pulget stores and reads with a language model through the providers named in its privacy policy. It changes what you share rather than removing every risk, and you can export or delete your workspace at any time. Analyzing a statement with AI compares this with pasting a statement into a chatbot.
Does it work across banks and countries?
Yes. Pulget reads statements and supported transaction files rather than relying on bank integrations, so the bank's country does not matter. The file needs to be a supported format, and you check the extraction before approving it. To turn statements into a spreadsheet, see converting bank statements to CSV.
Is it automatic?
Reading and extraction happen on their own after upload. Getting the file and reviewing the result are yours to do. It is not a continuous bank feed.