Download Your Bank & Card Transactions
Every report, every category, every clean Yearly Overview starts right here — with a file you pull straight from your bank. Five minutes done right beats twenty minutes of cleanup later.
This is the tutorial you'll come back to more than almost any other one in this library — not because it's complicated, but because it's the monthly heartbeat of the entire system. Get this five-minute habit right, and everything downstream gets easier. Get it wrong — wrong date range, mixed-up accounts, a mystery file with no name — and you'll spend twenty minutes untangling it later inside your sheet instead of thirty seconds fixing it now.
So we're going to slow down for a second and do this one carefully, the first time, so it becomes automatic every time after.
Step 1 — Log Into One Account
Just one. Resist the urge to open five browser tabs at once. You'll move through your accounts faster, not slower, by finishing one completely before starting the next.
Step 2 — Find the Transaction History
Look for a section labeled Transaction History, Account Activity, or Statements. Nearly every bank and card issuer puts it in one of those three places, though the exact wording changes by institution.
↑ "Transaction History" or "Account Activity" — look for one of these tabs. Note the PENDING badge on the deposit — do not include pending transactions in your download.
Step 3 — Find the Download or Export Button
Usually a button, sometimes disguised as a small arrow-with-a-line icon rather than an obvious label. It's often tucked near the top-right of the transaction list — look for a download arrow, "Export," or a three-dot menu.
Step 4 — Choose Your File Format
When asked, choose in this order of preference:
Step 5 — Select Your Date Range
Best practice is one month at a time. If you're building out the current year from scratch, start at January 1 and work forward one month per file — don't try to pull the whole year in a single download.
Step 6 — Save with Your Naming Convention
Drop it straight into your Money Mastery Downloads folder using the naming pattern you committed to in Workspace Setup:
Step 7 — Repeat for the Next Account
Same steps, one account at a time, until every institution for the month is pulled. Close each bank tab when you're done with it before opening the next — this keeps you from accidentally downloading the wrong account's transactions into the wrong file.
What to Check When You're Done
- Each file covers exactly the date range you intended — not last month, not year-to-date
- The file contains posted transactions only — pending ones can change or disappear, and importing them creates numbers that won't match your actual bank balance later
- The filename alone tells you which institution and which month it belongs to — no opening the file to figure out what's inside
A Few Things That Are Easy to Get Turned Around
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Downloading the wrong date rangeThe single most common slip — especially when a bank defaults to "last 90 days" instead of the specific month you meant. Double-check the range before clicking download, not after.
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Mixing multiple accounts into one fileIf your bank lets you view combined activity across accounts, resist it here. Money Mastery works best with one account, one file, every time.
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Forgetting whether a file belongs to Personal or BusinessIf you're pulling from a card you sometimes use for both, take the extra second to file it into the correct subfolder now — untangling that later inside your sheet is far more time-consuming than a two-second decision today.