Bootstrapping EveryDollar: I Disconnected My Bank, and Here’s Why

So, I've decided to ditch the bank connect feature in EveryDollar—I know, gasp! If you're not familiar, it's that thing that automatically imports your transactions from your bank into the app. Then you just categorize them. It's super helpful for two big reasons:

Convenience. Seriously, it's so easy to spend money or have bills on autopay and then have EveryDollar just pull those transactions right in, ready for you to sort.

Great Reminders. When transactions pop into EveryDollar, that little notification badge on the app icon is a perfect nudge to track our spending. It reminds us to reconcile everything.

But, as with anything good, there's a downside. My wife and I have a real love-hate thing with this feature. We love the convenience, but we absolutely can't stand the extra work it creates: the duplicate transactions. 

How does this happen? 

Well, if you manually enter a transaction, the bank connect will still import it once it posts to your bank account. This can be super annoying because later, when you check your transactions, you'll have double the entries, and you have to delete one. If it were just one or two, no big deal, but it happens every single time. So, we basically have to do double the work, deleting every single imported transaction.

We even tried to stop manually entering transactions and just categorize them later after they posted. But that caused its own problems. We'd forget where money went or how it was split, leading to confusion because the transaction typically posts a day or two later, and the date isn't when we actually spent the money. What should be a quick 10-minute reconciliation session would turn into a 30-minute "find the problem, delete the transaction" kind of session. That was just taking up too much of our time when we wanted budgeting to be easy and straightforward.

"It felt like we were being punished for being proactive with our tracking!" — Joshua - Financial Behavior Coach at Budgetiful

Our proposed solution to Ramsey Solutions was to create a matching icon that would let you quickly link an imported transaction with a manually entered one, based on the amount spent. YNAB has a similar feature. It makes reconciling so much easier because you can see that an imported transaction has a match and then just confirm it. I love that feature because it felt really satisfying to select all and confirm all those matching transactions.

So, over the next 30 days, my wife and I are stopping the bank connect feature and manually inputting our transactions daily. This will ensure all our transactions are accounted for and should significantly cut down on the work we have to do to reconcile.

Are you using the bank connect feature in EveryDollar? Tell us your experience at info@budgetiful.com.

About the author