Decide which accounts belong in the review
Include transactional accounts, credit cards, and other accounts that contain the spending you want to understand. A savings account may matter when it pays bills or receives income; it may add noise when it only holds long-term savings.
Choose one reporting period and obtain records for that same range from every included account. If one statement ends a week early, the combined category totals and cash flow will be incomplete.
Prevent transfers from inflating totals
When you move R2,000 from one of your accounts to another, one statement records money out and the other records money in. Across your finances as a whole, neither side is new income or consumption.
| Movement | Combined treatment | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Current account to your savings account | Internal transfer | Ownership of the money did not change. |
| Current account payment to your own credit card | Internal transfer or card repayment | The card purchases are the underlying expenses. |
| Salary from an employer | Income | Money entered your group of accounts from outside. |
| Payment to a retailer or service provider | Expense | Money left your group of accounts for a purchase or service. |
| Refund from a retailer | Refund or reversal | It normally offsets an earlier expense rather than representing salary. |
Match likely transfers using amount, date, and description, but check the original records before changing their treatment. Fees attached to a transfer remain genuine expenses.
Avoid duplicate and overlapping imports
Statements often overlap when you download a rolling three-month file each month. A tracking system should reconcile the same bank transaction rather than add it again. Review its import summary and retain account identity, dates, amounts, and references needed for matching.
Do not combine exported files by copying rows into a spreadsheet unless you have a reliable duplicate rule. Small description differences, pending-versus-posted dates, and reversals can make simple matching unreliable.
Review the combined picture and each account
Combined view
- Total external income and spending
- Categories across all included accounts
- Recurring commitments paid from different places
- Overall change across the period
Account view
- Charges and fees unique to the account
- Missing or unexpected activity
- Whether the statement period is complete
- The original context for a transfer or reversal
Using mooola with several South African banks
mooola can hold multiple imported accounts from supported banks in one local view. It reconciles repeated imports and lets you rename and manage each account independently. There is no live bank feed, so each account is current only to the latest statement you imported.
Check the current bank and format list, then follow the exact statement export guide for each bank. For the savings side of the process, see how to turn a spending review into repeatable changes.
