How to budget without open banking

What open banking is, and why you might skip it

Open banking lets an app read your transactions directly from your bank after you authorise it. It is convenient, and for many people it is fine. But it means granting a third party ongoing read access to your accounts, and re-authorising it every few months when the consent expires.

If you would rather not connect anything, you do not have to. Everything you need is already in your statements.

The CSV alternative

Every UK bank lets you download a statement as a CSV file, a simple spreadsheet of your transactions. A good budgeting tool can read that file, set internal transfers aside, remove duplicates and categorise the rest. You get the same picture, without connecting anything.

How to export a CSV from your bank

The exact steps vary, but the shape is the same across banks and cards.

• In your banking app or website, open the account and find statements or transactions.
• Choose a date range, usually the last month or the current one.
• Export or download, and pick CSV if you are asked for a format.
• Repeat for each account and card you want to include.

Keeping it current

Budgeting from CSV works best as a short monthly ritual. Once a month, download the latest statements, import them, review anything uncategorised, and reconcile your balances. Fifteen minutes is usually enough.

The privacy upside

With no connection, nothing has standing access to your accounts. Your banking relationship stays between you and your bank, and your data stays with the tool you chose to put it in. For a lot of people, that is worth a few minutes a month.

Doing it in Tweed

Tweed is CSV-first by design. It imports statements from the major UK banks and cards, sorts and de-duplicates them, and its AI only ever sees transaction descriptions and amounts, never your name, account numbers or dates.