How to import a PrivatBank statement

Why a statement, when the bank has an app

The bank’s app shows every purchase, and that seems like enough. But it shows them the way that suits the bank: by date, with the shop’s name, sometimes with a rough category the bank guessed on its own. It does not know that Silpo, for you, is groceries rather than presents; it does not see cash, and it does not see your other card at another bank. So it cannot show you the picture of where the money goes — only the list.

A statement is that same list, but in a file you can take away with you. From there you can sort it into your own categories, put it together with cash and with other banks, and compare one month with the next. And the main thing: you do not have to write anything down day by day — the bank has already recorded it all for you. What is left is to collect the file once a week or once a month and spend fifteen minutes sorting it.

It is the cheapest way of keeping records there is. If you have ever given up writing down expenses by hand because it took too long, a statement solves exactly that problem.

Where to get the statement in Privat24

1. 1Open the Privat24 app and choose the card you need the statement for. A statement is made for one card at a time, so if you have several cards, there will be a separate file for each.
2. 2Find the item called “Statement”. It may be in the card’s menu or in the section with the card’s history — the bank moves it around from time to time, so go by the word itself rather than by where it was last time.
3. 3Choose the period. For a first attempt take one or two months — enough to see how it all works without drowning in hundreds of lines. After that take exactly the stretch you do not have yet: from the day after the last statement to today.
4. 4Choose the format: a table (a file with the xlsx extension, which opens in Excel) or a PDF. Which one to take is the next section.
5. 5Save the file, or send it straight to wherever you keep your records. On the phone there is a “Share” button for this — it opens a list of apps the file can be passed to.
6. 6The same can be done from a computer, in Privat24 in the browser: there too the statement is made per card and per period, with the same choice between a table and a PDF.

Table or PDF

If you have the choice, take the table. In it every entry is its own line and every value is its own cell: date, description, amount, balance. It is easy to open, check and sort, and any tracking app reads it without mistakes. A PDF is, in effect, a printout: it looks nice, but each line has to be “read” off a picture, and dates and amounts go wrong there more often.

Take the PDF only when the table is not to hand, or when the file is meant for a person rather than a program — to show someone, say. For keeping records — the table.

The statement holds the date of each entry, a description (usually the shop’s name or the purpose of a transfer), the amount, the currency and the balance on the card after it. What it does not hold is your categories. The bank does not know what counts as “groceries” and what counts as “cafés” for you, so sorting the entries is up to you — or to an app that does it for you.

What is confusing in a PrivatBank statement

• The table looks empty. You open the file, and the first row holds not the headers but the bank’s name and the period. The column headers sit in the second row, and that is normal: all the data is below them. A tracking app that knows this quirk reads such a file without any trouble.
• Two amounts in one line. If you paid abroad or online in a foreign currency, the statement shows the amount of the purchase (say, 20 dollars) and the amount the bank took from the card in hryvnia. For your records the second one is the right one — that is how much money was actually taken from you. The first one simply explains what for.
• A certificate instead of a statement. Privat24 has another document — a certificate of account balances. It is a PDF too, and it looks official too, but there are no entries in it, only totals. It cannot be loaded into a tracker: there is simply nothing in it to sort. If the app says the file does not look like a statement, most likely you took the certificate.
• Transfers between your own cards. You moved money from one of your cards to another — in the statement that is an expense on the first and an income on the second. It is neither an expense nor an income, it is a move. If you record both sides as an expense and an income, the month will look bigger than it was.

What to do after loading it

1. 1Check the period. The most common mistake is to load two overlapping files and get the same purchase twice. If the app looks for duplicates itself, good — but it is still worth checking where the period starts and ends.
2. 2Sort into categories, starting with the largest amounts. The ten largest payments of a month usually make up two thirds of all spending, and they are what set the picture. Small things can be left in “Other” — the overall picture hardly changes because of them.
3. 3Mark transfers between your own accounts as transfers, not as expenses. Topping up your phone, paying the utility bills, sending money to a friend — those are expenses; a card-to-card transfer to yourself is not.
4. 4A cash withdrawal at an ATM is its own story. In the statement it is one amount. If you do not record where the cash went, leave it as a single expense called “cash” and do not try to remember what you bought. Trying to reconstruct spending from memory is the main reason people give up tracking.
5. 5Look at the month’s total and at the three largest categories. If everything was done right, those three figures are the answer to the question “where did the money go” that the whole exercise was for.

How often to do it

Once a week is the most comfortable rhythm. There are not many entries, you still remember what each one was, and sorting takes about ten minutes. If a week does not work out, once a month works too: sorting takes longer, half an hour or so, but you are certain not to miss a month, because it is one action rather than four.

What does not work is “when I have time”. That time never comes, and three months later a five-hundred-line file is waiting for you that you would rather look away from. So pick a day — say, the first Sunday of the month — and do the statement on that day, regardless of how many entries are in it.

In FinLad this path is shorter than the one described above: on Android the statement file can be sent to the app straight from Privat24 through “Share”, without saving it to the phone first. The app finds duplicates itself if the periods overlap, and suggests categories for shops it has seen before — all that is left for you is to check and confirm. Statement import is part of the Plus plan; recording expenses by hand is possible for free.

Example: the first month with a statement

Oksana had never kept records and decided to try starting from a statement. She took the table for September from her main card — a hundred and forty lines. At first it scared her, but she followed the list above: checked the period, sorted by amount and filed the ten largest payments. That took about ten minutes, and those ten lines accounted for sixty-five per cent of all the month’s spending: rent, two big shopping trips, car insurance, the dentist.

Next came forty lines from Silpo, ATB and coffee shops, which all went into “groceries” and “cafés” in a few minutes, because the shop’s name repeated. The rest — seventy small entries adding up to less than a thousand hryvnia altogether — she left in “Other”, and did not regret it.

Three transfers between her own cards she first recorded as expenses, and the month came out twelve thousand larger than her income. She found them, changed them to transfers — and it added up. Two cash withdrawals she left as “cash”, one amount each. The whole job: forty minutes once a month, instead of the daily entries she had given up on three times.

The most common mistakes

• One period loaded twice. The month’s spending looks twice as large, and people panic. The cure is to check the dates before loading and to delete the duplicates if the app did not notice them.
• A balance certificate taken instead of a statement. The file holds no entries, and there is nothing to load. Go back to Privat24 and look for the word “Statement” itself.
• Foreign-currency purchases recorded at the amount of the purchase rather than the amount charged. The difference is the fee and the bank’s rate, and it eats a few per cent every time. The right figure is the one that left the card.
• Cash forgotten. You withdrew five thousand, in the statement it is one line, and then silence. The month’s total spending is still right — the withdrawal is already counted; only the breakdown by category will be wrong, and that is something you can live with.
• A statement from only one card. If you have several cards and skip one, the picture is incomplete exactly where it is most interesting. Make a statement for each of them — or at least for the ones you pay with every day.