Dr Bling Bling
How to track expenses from your bank statement
You do not have to log a single purchase. Your bank has already written them all down, and a statement is the most complete record of your spending you will ever get.
Step 1: get the statement
Sign in to your bank's website or app and find Statements or Documents. Most American banks keep several years of monthly PDFs there. Many also let you export transactions as a CSV, usually from the account activity page, and a spreadsheet is easier to work with than a PDF if your bank offers one.
Get one for your checking account and one for each credit card. If you pay a card from checking, you will see that payment on both. That is the trap we come to in step 3.
Step 2: sort every payment into a small number of groups
Groceries, eating out, housing, utilities, transport, health, shopping, subscriptions. Keep to a dozen or so. More groups than that and you stop filling them in.
Banks shorten names and add reference numbers, so a lot of this is detective work. Sort the biggest amounts first, because ten lines usually account for most of the month.
Step 3: do not count your card bill twice
This is the mistake that ruins most homemade spending totals. Your groceries appear on the card statement, and the payment to the card appears on your checking statement. Count both and you have counted the same shopping twice. The fix is to leave out payments to your own card, and transfers between your own accounts.
Step 4: compare with last month
One month tells you little. Two tells you what changed, and that is usually what you wanted to know.
The shortcut
Doing this by hand takes about an hour a month, and most people stop after two. Dr Bling Bling does steps 2 to 4 on your iPhone. Share the statements to it and it sorts the payments, spots payments between your own accounts so that a card bill is not counted twice, and asks only about what it cannot place. It places roughly three quarters of payments by itself on a first import, and it never asks about the same place twice.
Where the statement prints a running balance, it also checks each line against it, which is more than a spreadsheet will do for you.
See what your own statement says
Free to download, and every way of adding a statement is free. No bank login, no account, no subscription.
Questions people ask
Do bank statements show what you bought?
They show who you paid, when and how much, but not the items. You will see the store's name and not what was in the bag.
How far back can I go?
Most banks keep years of monthly statements online. Check your bank's site, since the limit varies.
Can I use a paper statement?
Yes. Photograph it with Dr Bling Bling or pick the photo. A clear, flat photo reads best, and it will flag anything it is unsure of.
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Written by the people who make Dr Bling Bling. Checked on 1 November 2026.