Budgeting without linking your bank: how CSV-first works in Europe
Tomo — founder, Fyncora
Every mainstream finance app opens with the same demand: connect your bank. For a lot of people that's fine. For a meaningful minority — and, we'd argue, for anyone who stops to think about it — handing a third party a standing connection to every transaction you make is a strange price for a budget.
Fyncora is built manual-first, and this post is the honest version of what that means in practice: how it works, what it costs you, and why it's a design decision rather than a missing feature.
How money actually gets in
Three ways, and none of them involves your bank credentials:
1. CSV import, once a month. Every European bank exports transactions as a file — it's your legal right to your own data, and it works for every bank from day one, from Deutsche Bank to the smallest credit union. Download, drop it into Fyncora, and the import wizard maps columns, matches categories, and skips anything it has already seen. Realistic time cost: about two minutes per account per month.
2. Quick add, as you go. A coffee takes four taps on your phone. People who do this daily report something the sync crowd misses: typing the amount is the feature. You feel the spending, which is half the point of tracking it.
3. Receipt scan. Photograph a receipt and the mobile app reads the amount, date and merchant — on your phone. The photo is processed on-device and never uploaded anywhere.
Recurring bills don't need any of this — set them up once and Fyncora projects and matches them automatically.
What you give up, honestly
Real-time balances. If you never log or import anything, the app won't know about it. Manual-first budgeting is a habit with a two-minute monthly cost, and people who want a fully automatic, glance-only tool are better served by a sync-first app — that's a genuine trade-off, not a gotcha.
Two things soften it in practice: duplicate detection means importing is idempotent (you can't double-count by importing twice), and the app is honest about staleness — a balance you last confirmed three weeks ago doesn't pretend to be live.
What you get back
- No credentials to steal. Fyncora never has your bank login, so it can't lose it. There is no aggregator in the middle, no consent chain to audit, no third party seeing every transaction.
- Every bank works. Sync coverage in Europe is patchy per-bank and per-country. A CSV works everywhere, immediately, including that small local bank sync-first apps never support.
- Deliberate awareness. The friction is small and it points the right way.
And to be straight about the roadmap: optional bank sync (via Europe's regulated PSD2 rails) is planned — for people who want it, in a tier that pays for it, never as a requirement. Manual-first stays the default, because the default should be the private one.
If you're coming from a sync-first app
The guided import understands the export formats of Mint, YNAB, Monarch and Copilot — signs, categories and duplicates handled. Or skip the reading and just try the live demo: it's seeded with realistic data, in your language and currency, no sign-up.