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Import without a bank link

Plaid covers most US banks, but not every country or institution. If you can’t link your bank directly, you can still get your transactions into Pennyweight — just have your AI read a statement and add them for you.

How it works

Your AI assistant already reads PDFs and spreadsheets. So the import is a conversation, not an upload form:

  • First, connect Pennyweight to your AI.
  • In Settings → Accounts, add a manual account for the bank or card you’re importing (so the transactions have somewhere to live), or just ask your AI to create one.
  • Share your statement in the chat — a PDF or CSV — and say something like: “Read this statement and add the transactions to my [account name] in Pennyweight.”
  • Your AI reads the file, pulls out each transaction, and adds them to your ledger. It checks what’s already there and flags likely duplicates, so re-importing an overlapping month won’t quietly double up. Matching is exact — same date, same amount, same merchant — so if your bank words things differently in an export than in the live feed, give the summary a skim before you confirm.
  • You’ll see a summary before anything is saved — how many new transactions, how many look like duplicates — and confirm.

Why it works this way

For a PDF, a photo, or a screenshot, your AI does the reading. Pennyweight has no document scanner — the assistant extracts the rows in your conversation and sends us those, so the statement itself never leaves the chat and no third-party parser sees it.

A CSV is the one exception: it’s a plain table, so you can hand the file to Pennyweight directly and we parse the rows ourselves. Either way the transactions land in your encrypted ledger and duplicate-checking happens on our side.

Tips

  • A clear PDF or a CSV export works best. A blurry photo of a statement is harder for the AI to read accurately.
  • Importing several months? Do them one statement at a time and confirm each — it keeps the duplicate-checking clean.
  • Imported the wrong file? Ask your AI to undo that import. It reverses the whole batch, and a transaction deleted by mistake can be restored for 30 days.
  • On ChatGPT, do this on the web — Developer-mode connectors aren’t available in the mobile or desktop apps. Adding transactions is a write action, so ChatGPT will ask you to confirm, and on some plans write tools aren’t offered at all; see the ChatGPT guide.