Maintaining a 'transaction log' (esp. with Chase!)

ChilliBob

Hey everyone, 

I'm trying to take a much closer look at my transactions this year, predominantly to keep an eye on spending but also to make sure say refunds are processed, see what interest payments I'm receiving etc. I've been eyeballing it but a closer approach is needed - mostly because my 2024 spending, when looking in more detail, was about 50% more than I'd anticipated!

This seems to be classical 'data warehouse' type problem - taking data from multiple sources, 'cleaning' it and merging it. I'm well versed in this type of thing, well, I was a few years ago!

I'd started to create an excel file - thinking I could manually process statements and stuff. Natwest and Chase are my primary accounts. There in lies the problem, from what I can see all I can get out of chase is a PDF each month - which is a bit of a naff thing to copy/paste from, not sure how I could 'scrape' it instead from a specific folder or something.

There's other accounts to consider too - but these will have far fewer transactions - think savings easy access etc - so I'm happy to do those manually.

The end goal was to have a spreadsheet of raw data, which I could classify and then spit out whatever I wanted - say a pivot table of spending by month or similar.

Thoughts much appreciated - am I doing this a long winded way and there's a cleaner way? Should I be using something else to achieve this?

ChilliBob

Edit: It seems you *can* create a custom CVS from chase, which is a big improvement on a PDF which Excel can't do much with. So, progress, but I guess the questions still stand really - is this the way forward, or am I opening myself up to a world of tedium when there's a better alternative?

AmityNeon

Open Banking?

https://snoop.app/banks/

ChilliBob

AmityNeon said:

Open Banking?

https://snoop.app/banks/

I'd never heard of that before, very interesting. Even a pro version at £40 a year may be worth it. Cheers, I'll give it a look. 

Baldeagle095

I use MoneyPoint (free) and a spreadsheet to monitor all my income, expenditure and transfers. 

I have been doing it for over 2 years.

I have 20 or so accounts and every movement is recorded diligently. It only takes 5 minutes or so per day.

I have detailed cash flow summaries, income and expediture accounts etc for 1832 transactions. All accounts can be exported into Excel.

ChilliBob

Baldeagle095 said:

I use MoneyPoint (free) and a spreadsheet to monitor all my income, expenditure and transfers. 

I have been doing it for over 2 years.

I have 20 or so accounts and every movement is recorded diligently. It only takes 5 minutes or so per day.

I have detailed cash flow summaries, income and expediture accounts etc for 1832 transactions. All accounts can be exported into Excel.

That sounds very interesting, all I can see for MoneyPoint looks more like something aimed at business as opposed to individuals, https://www.moneypoint.ie/ie/products/categories/buy-online/  guessing I must be using the wrong thing!

It sounds ideal though, as my manual plan, a-la 90s, whilst suitable for the task, would be very time consuming - time I don't really have!

gt94sss2

I suspect the MoneyPoint being discussed is

https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9wzdncrfjccd?hl=en-gb&gl=US and/or https://download.cnet.com/moneypoint-for-windows-10/3000-2057_4-77579246.html

ChilliBob

Thanks, that looks much more like it. Not sure why I didn't spot that... 

As a exercise I did 2024 for just chase and  nat west manually (well, Excel pivot tables and such like) . As predicted, it was tedious, however, both useful and insightful. I've learnt some lessons for myself for 2025.

I'll check this out for sure, it certainly sounds useful.