Typing in expenses one by one is the part of a budget that makes most people give up. Not because it is hard, but because it is repetitive, and because the bank already has the whole list, neat and complete, in a PDF that downloads in two taps. The natural question is: why not use that list?
The usual answer from finance apps is to connect to the bank, or to ask you to send the statement to their servers, where it gets read. Both work, and both carry a cost not everyone wants to pay: handing the full history of your purchases to a company that is not your bank.
Mayora does it differently. This piece explains how, what happens to each movement when you import a bank statement, and what stays out.
How do you import a bank statement into Mayora?
You pick the bank, you pick the PDF, and the phone reads it.
In Import movements, you choose "Bank statement" and then the bank. For now Mayora reads current account statements from Santander and Novo Banco, and the other banks appear in the list as not yet available. You choose the PDF you downloaded from online banking, and the reading happens right there, on your device.
What needs the network is the PDF reader, which downloads the first time like any other part of the app. The statement does not travel with it: the reader comes to the file, not the file to a reader.
One detail that saves frustration: the PDF has to be the one the bank generates, with text in it. A paper scan, or a photo of the statement, has no text to read, and the app tells you so rather than inventing movements.
Is the bank statement sent to any server?
No. Not even ours.
The file is opened, read and forgotten on the phone itself. What the app takes from it is a list of movements: date, description, amount. That list is shown to you to review, and nothing is saved until you confirm.
When you confirm, what is stored is the movements you chose to import, exactly as if you had typed them in by hand: an expense with a date, an amount, a category and who paid. The PDF is not kept anywhere, and neither is the rest of the statement: balances, account number, the movements you chose not to import.
This matters more in a shared budget than it might seem. One person's statement says a great deal more than the household's costs, and the household only needs to see the household's costs.
How does Mayora check the import is right?
It checks the sums against the statement's own balance before showing you anything.
A statement carries the opening balance, the closing balance and the balance after each movement. The app adds up the movements it read and checks them against those balances. If they match, it says so: "figures agree: so many movements match the bank's balance". If they do not, it will not let you import like that.
It looks like excess caution and it is the opposite. A PDF reader that gets one line wrong produces a wrong month in silence, and a wrong month is worse than an unwritten one, because people trust it. The balance check is what guarantees that what goes in is what is at the bank, no more and no less.
What happens to each movement when you import the bank statement?
It arrives with a suggestion, and with the reason for it.
Every line on the statement arrives already sorted, and the app tells you why. The most common cases:
| The movement | What the app suggests |
|---|---|
| A purchase in a shop | An expense, in a category |
| The debit for a bill it recognises | Mark that bill as paid, and create no new expense |
| The salary | Check it against the income you declared, and not add it again |
| A transfer to a savings goal | A top-up of that goal |
| A transfer between your own accounts | Ignore it, because the money did not leave home |
| A line you had already logged by hand | Arrives switched off, as a duplicate |
The right-hand column is what saves the most work and prevents the most mistakes. A bill imported as an expense would sit in the month twice; a salary added on top of declared income would inflate the month. The reasoning is in budgeting for bills: why they only count as spent once paid.
If a suggestion is wrong, you tap the line and change it. And the lines the app cannot decide on its own appear separately, as "need you".
What if you import the same bank statement twice?
Nothing gets duplicated.
Movements that came in on an earlier statement are recognised and arrive switched off, with the reason: "it came in on an earlier statement". The same goes for the ones you logged by hand with the same date and the same amount. You can import March's statement and then one covering March and April together, and only what is new goes in.
It is the rule that prevents the most common mistake in shared finances: the same cost counted twice, once because someone typed it, once because it came from the bank. The rest of that story is in how to split expenses as a couple.
Does the import learn from what you correct on the statement?
Yes, and it shows you what it learned.
Every line you correct is kept as a rule, so you do not have to correct it on the next statement. If you said that monthly transfer is the emergency fund top-up, next time it arrives that way, with the reason "recognised by a rule you taught".
The rules live in the settings, under Statement rules, one per line, and each says what it does. Deleting a rule changes nothing you have already imported: it only means that movement gets decided from scratch on the next statement.
What if your bank is not on the list for the import?
There is the spreadsheet, and there is doing it by hand.
For banks Mayora does not read yet, there is the spreadsheet import: you download the template, fill in one row per movement with date, description and amount, and upload it again. It is more comfortable on a computer than on a phone, and many online banking services let you export movements in a format that copies into the template easily.
The file has to be the template, as .xlsx. If it comes from another program,
the app tells you how to export it in the right format rather than failing in
silence.
And there is always the manual way, which gives the most awareness of what you spend, precisely because it is manual. Reading a statement carefully once, by hand, teaches things no import teaches, and the method is in how to read a bank statement.
Where to start importing your bank statement, today
Three steps, and the first happens in online banking.
- Download last month's current account statement as a PDF. The one the bank generates, not a scan.
- In Import movements, pick the bank and the file. Wait for the balance check. If the sums do not match, do not import; tell us which bank and which month through the help requests in the app.
- Review the suggestions before confirming. Especially the bills, the salary and whatever is under "need you". What you correct today will already be right next month.
We keep a page of frequently asked questions about budgeting and everyday money, with a short answer to each one and the full piece one click away. If you want to see it, it is here: frequently asked questions.
This is educational writing. It is not financial advice or an investment recommendation; for advice on products, speak to a professional registered with the CMVM.