Most budgeting apps want your bank login. They call it “connecting your account”, and it means a third party reads every transaction you make, for as long as you use the app, and sometimes after.
There is another way to get a month of spending into an app in a few minutes: photograph the statement.
How it works in Expense Diary
Open Settings and tap Scan a statement, or choose it from the app icon’s long-press menu. Point the camera at a printed statement, a screenshot of your banking app, or a PDF opened on screen. The app reads every row it can see into a list:
| Date | Description | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| 12 Sep | TESCO STORES 2345 | −£23.40 |
| 12 Sep | TFL TRAVEL CH | −£7.20 |
| 13 Sep | SALARY ACME LTD | +£2,650.00 |
Nothing is added yet. You tick the rows you want, correct any figure the reader got wrong, choose the account they belong to, and only then tap Add. Rows you skip are simply dropped.
Each added row becomes an ordinary entry, with a category suggested from the description. “TESCO STORES” goes to Groceries, “TFL” to Transport, and the app remembers your corrections for next time.
What the reader understands
Statements are more regular than receipts, so the reader does well with them. It handles:
- Dates in day-first and month-first order, and the 12 Sep style banks favour.
- Amounts with or without a currency sign, with money in and money out told apart.
- Screenshots from banking apps, which are often clearer than paper.
- A statement longer than one photo: scan the next page and its rows join the same list.
It does not try to understand balance columns, and it ignores headers, footers and page numbers.
Why a photo rather than a connection
Three reasons, in the order they matter.
Nothing leaves your phone. The reading uses the phone’s own text recognition. The photo is not uploaded, no account is created, and no company ever holds your transactions. Expense Diary runs no servers at all.
You decide what goes in. A connected app imports everything, including the transfers between your own accounts, the refunds, the pending items that never settle. Ticking rows takes a minute and gives you a clean diary.
It keeps working. Bank connections break: banks change their systems, consents expire every ninety days, and a connected app stops updating without telling you. A photo has no dependencies.
The cost is a few minutes a month. For most people that is once at the end of the month, or once when they start using the app and want the last few weeks in it.
A good first-day routine
If you are starting fresh:
- Add your accounts with today’s balances.
- Photograph the current month’s statement and tick the rows.
- Add your regular bills on the Bills tab so they are held back from safe to spend.
From then on, log purchases as they happen, or scan the receipt, and use the statement scan only to catch anything you missed.
See it in three minutes
Try it
Expense Diary is free on Google Play, and coming to the App Store. Statement scanning is part of the free version.
More about the app on its page.