Welcome to Pinke: Turn Bank Statements Into a Money Map

Have you ever opened a bank export and thought "cool, now what?" Then you are in the right place.

Budgeting is not hard because you are bad with money. It is hard because the file is hostile:

• 23-page PDFs
• CSVs that seem designed by a committee of ghosts
• Transactions named like secret spells: ECOMM*XZL-4921 (very helpful, thanks)

You only want to know one thing: "What are my fixed costs this month?" Instead you spend three hours sorting rows by hand. That is not budgeting. That is a point-and-click adventure. When the puzzle gets boring, you stop playing.

So we built Pinke to remove the puzzle and keep the clarity.

The short version

Pinke turns your bank statements into a clear spending picture. You upload a file, Pinke sorts the rows into categories, and you get charts and reports. No spreadsheet to maintain.

Less time cleaning. More time knowing.

The spreadsheet that became the final boss

Pinke started as one spreadsheet. Nothing fancy. Just a place to write down what came in and what went out.

At first it felt great. A few categories, a few totals, and the chaos looked readable.

Then life got bigger. More accounts. Kids. School stuff. Subscriptions — the useful ones, the weird ones, the immortal ones. Rent went up. Energy went up.

The real problem came slowly. The spreadsheet was too rough and too fragile. Shops got renamed. One clean payment became three lines. Refunds arrived late. Small fees appeared in odd corners. The sheet could hold a total, but it could not explain the story behind it.

So every month became a cleanup job. At some point we noticed: we were not tracking money. We were maintaining a system.

So we stopped maintaining, and started building.

Why Pinke uses rules

Your money is more repetitive than you think. Most months hold the same blocks: rent, groceries, fuel, subscriptions, a few regular shops, and some one-offs.

The hard part is not naming a category. The hard part is staying consistent when the details change.

That is why Pinke is rule-based. A rule is a simple instruction you write once: if the text contains this, put it in that category. Rules are:

• Predictable — the same rule gives the same result every time
• Transparent — you can see why a transaction landed where it landed
• Easy to fix — when a shop changes its name, you edit one rule, not 200 rows

Pinke applies rules in a fixed order: your own rules first, then merchant defaults, then the built-in system rules, then a machine-learning guess, and anything still unclear goes to a review queue. Your rules always win. You can read this order yourself on the rules page, under "How rules work".

Want the long version with more examples? Read Rules That Stick: How Pinke Stays Consistent.

Let's do it: your first import

Here is the whole thing, start to finish. Say you bank with DKB.

1. Upload the file. Go to Import Statements. Under Upload File you can click the box or drag your CSV onto it. Pinke reads exports from Revolut, DKB, Sparkasse, Postbank, Vivid and Trade Republic. Some as CSV, some as PDF.

Bank not in the list? There is a button called Copy prompt. It gives you a text block to paste into ChatGPT or Claude together with your export, so the assistant converts it into a format Pinke reads. Be careful here: your data leaves Pinke and goes to that AI service, and assistants make mistakes. Check the result before you upload it.

2. Analyze. After the upload, your file appears with its own tab. Press Analyze. Pinke now runs the rule order from above over every row.

3. Fix the odd ones. Most rows land correctly. A few will not. Say PAYPAL *KAFFEEROESTER for 18,90 € landed in the wrong place. Open Rules, click New rule, and tell it: text contains KAFFEEROESTER, category Groceries. Before saving, press Test rule against history to see which past rows this rule would catch. Then Create rule and analyze again.

That last step is the one that pays off. You fixed one rule, and every future coffee order is sorted forever.

4. Look at it. Go to Visualize. The charts have silly names but do serious work:

• Flow Mo' Show — trends and net flow
• The Balancing Act — income against spending over time
• Pie Hard: Expense Edition — where the money went, by slice
• The Paper Trail — every transaction, newest first
• The Subscription Trap™ — every recurring charge, with the next expected date
• Portfolio Overview — buys, sells, regrets
• Tax Overview — tax-relevant rows for the year

5. Export it. On the report page you filter your rows and tick the ones you want. Then press Export Report, pick a Format and a Type — Summary, Bill, or Landlord — and download it. If you use the same view often, save it under Presets.

That is the full loop. Upload, analyze, fix a rule, read the charts.

Things that are not in your bank file

Not all money moves through a bank account. On Import Statements there is a Manual Account section. Press New Account and add cash, a private loan, or a car loan. These rows show up in your charts and reports next to the imported ones.

You can also set an opening balance for a file with Set balance, so your running total starts from the right number.

Your data is not a business model

We will say this plainly. Your bank data is not fuel for ads or profiling.

• No ads
• No tracking
• No analytics spying
• No selling data
• Only storage that is technically needed, like a session token
• Your uploads exist to show you your own analysis

You should be able to look at your finances without feeling watched. That is the baseline, not a feature.

If we ever build something that reaches beyond your own account view — like comparing patterns across many users — we will ask you first, in clear words, and you will be able to turn it off. Nothing gets switched on quietly.

What Pinke is

Pinke is the calm layer between your bank export and your understanding.

It takes messy input — PDFs, CSVs, strange labels — and gives back a structure that means the same thing next month and next year. That consistency is the real value. It makes changes easy to spot and makes your spending something you can actually talk about.

We are still building. Importing should need less cleanup. Charts should stay useful and not get noisy. If you have an idea or a use case, tell us. Pinke started as "we need this" and turned into "maybe others do too".

Ready? Open Import Statements, drop in your last statement, and press Analyze. Your money should not be a puzzle. It should be a map to your treasure. 🧭

Made with care in Bernau ʕ •ᴥ•ʔ