You get to the third screen of a new expense app and it asks for your online banking username and password. Not a redirect to your bank \u2014 a form, on their domain, with their logo on it. That is the moment most people close the tab, and it is a reasonable instinct.<\/p>\n
There are two ways to get transaction data into PennySlice, and neither one involves typing your banking password into PennySlice. One requires no standing access to any account at all. The other uses a revocable, read-only token issued by your bank. They cost you different things and they are available in different places.<\/p>\n
Import your own exports. Every bank has an export button somewhere \u2014 usually on the transaction list, sometimes buried under “statements” or “download”. You pull a file, you drop it into PennySlice, and that is the whole handshake. No credentials change hands, no token is issued, nothing is left connected when you close the tab.<\/p>\n
PennySlice accepts CSV, Excel, OFX and PDF, plus forwarded email receipts and photos of paper receipts. There is no template to choose and no column-mapping step. The AI reads the file, works out which column is the date and which is the amount, and handles the fact that your bank writes debits as negative numbers and your credit card writes them as positive ones.<\/p>\n
That matters more than it sounds. Column mapping is where most people abandon an import \u2014 six dropdowns, unclear labels, and a preview table that looks wrong. If you have tried an expense tracker that accepts CSV upload before and given up at that screen, the difference here is that there is no screen.<\/p>\n
What import costs you is a recurring action. Nothing arrives on its own. You do it monthly, or weekly if you like tighter numbers, and if you skip a month the data has a hole in it. For some people that is a fair trade and for others it is the reason they stopped using spreadsheets.<\/p>\n
What it buys you, beyond the credential question: it works with any bank in any country. If your bank can produce a file, PennySlice can read it. There are 104 bank export guides in the product covering 14 countries, with the heaviest coverage in the US and Canada, then the UK, then eleven more European markets. If you bank in Canada, the export steps for RBC, TD, Scotiabank, BMO, CIBC and National Bank<\/a> are already written down.<\/p>\n The other path is linking a bank, and it is worth being precise about the mechanism, because “connecting your bank” gets used to describe two very different things.<\/p>\n PennySlice links through Plaid using OAuth. You pick your bank, your bank’s own login page opens, and you authenticate there. The credentials go to the bank, not to PennySlice, and PennySlice never stores your banking password because it never receives it.<\/p>\n What comes back is a read-only bank access token scoped to transactions and balances. Read-only means it cannot move money, initiate a payment or change anything in your account. It can look. And it stays valid only as long as you want it to \u2014 you can revoke it from inside PennySlice, and you can also revoke it from your bank’s own connected-apps settings, which is the more reassuring of the two because it does not depend on us cooperating.<\/p>\n The cost of linking is that it is narrower. Bank linking is available in the US and Canada only. Not the UK, not the EU, regardless of how many export guides exist for those markets. If you bank in Amsterdam or Manchester, import is your path, and it is a complete path \u2014 the whole product runs on imported data.<\/p>\n Linking also sits on the paid tiers. Insight supports up to 3 linked accounts, Predict supports up to 10. Track is free forever and works on imports.<\/p>\n What linking buys you is that transactions show up without you doing anything. That is not just convenience \u2014 it is what makes the background detection useful. Penny Spotter runs seven detectors continuously: budget pace, category anomalies, recurring cost creep, predicted expenses, savings opportunities, income changes and merchant concentration. A subscription that quietly rose gets flagged when it rises, not when you next remember to export a file.<\/p>\nWhat read-only bank access actually means<\/h2>\n
The honest comparison<\/h2>\n