You will be able to download your transaction data from your bank and remove the details that should not be shared.
Before any AI touches your budget, download one month of transactions from one account, cut the file down to date, description and amount, and remove anything that identifies you, another person or an account. Save that as a separate file, and paste only that file into an assistant.
Priya, an example learner, has tried to budget three times. Each attempt started with a blank spreadsheet and a week of spending typed in from memory, and each time she got bored and stopped. Her bank holds every transaction from last month, with dates and amounts already in order, and she has never downloaded any of it. This module builds a working budget from that existing record. An assistant does the sorting, a spreadsheet does the totals, and you stay in charge of both. Getting the data out and stripping it to what the job needs comes first, before any AI is involved.
Banks' own help pages, such as DBS's, confirm that you can download your transaction details from internet banking. The option usually sits near your account history, under a name like download, export or statement. Banks do not all say which file format you will get, so your own bank's help page is the place to check. Check which formats are offered and pick CSV if it is there, because it opens straight into Excel or Google Sheets with one transaction per row.
If your download comes only as a PDF statement, it takes more work, but you can use it: select the transaction table in the PDF, copy it, paste it into a spreadsheet and tidy the columns. Skip the free online PDF-to-spreadsheet converters. They ask you to upload your full statement to a service you know nothing about, which undoes the privacy work you are about to do.
Begin with one account and one month. If you hold several, say a savings account and two credit cards, choose the one carrying most of your everyday spending and add the others after the method works.
A typical export comes with extras: your account number at the top, a running balance, reference numbers, transaction codes, and sometimes a branch or channel column. The budget uses three columns. You need the date to know which month a transaction belongs to, the description so the assistant can work out what it was, and the amount so the spreadsheet can add it up.
Delete every other column, along with any header rows showing your name, address or account number. The balance column goes because anyone who sees the file would know how much money you have. Reference codes go because some of them can identify a specific transaction or account.
If your export puts money out and money in into two separate columns, you can keep both for now or combine them into one amount column, with spending as positive numbers and money in as negative. Whichever you choose is your sign convention, and you should keep using it, since the totals in Lesson 2.4 depend on it.
Expect messy descriptions: a supermarket name cut short, a food delivery service with a long order code after it, a PayNow transfer showing part of a phone number or someone's initials, a card payment under a trading name that looks nothing like the shop sign, a GIRO deduction to an insurer.
Change these only where they identify a person or an account. Removing a phone number or full name from a PayNow line is right. Turning "SUPERMKT TAMPINES CTR" into "groceries" is categorising, and that is the assistant's task, so leave the merchant text alone. Lesson 1.2, Four money jobs AI does well, covered why an assistant is good at this: it has read enough text about shops and payment services to make a sensible guess at most of them. Two hundred rows would take you an evening by hand and the assistant a few seconds, which leaves your time for checking its answers instead of typing.
Before saving, scroll through every row once more for anything you missed, such as a name inside a transfer description, a full card number on a refund line or an address in a delivery charge. For a transaction export the rule is nothing that identifies you, another person or an account. Lesson 7.1, What never goes into an assistant, gives the full list of categories.
Keep two files:
The cleaned file is the three-column, de-identified copy, saved under a plain new name such as "march cleaned.csv". It is the only file you use with an assistant. The original download stays unchanged, stored privately and never pasted anywhere, so you can go back to it when something looks wrong later.
The cleaned file should be the only one that ever leaves your folder. If you find yourself pausing to work out which file you are pasting from, the system has already failed.
Priya did this for March, using the credit card she puts almost everything on. It took her twelve minutes, and most of that went on finding the download button.
Your turn is next: one account, one month, three columns, saved as its own file.
Download one month of transactions from one account. Delete every column except date, description and amount, then save the result as a cleaned CSV.
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