The Financial Information Gap: Turning a Bank Statement Into an Overview

Open your bank statement. What do you see?

A list. Dates on the left, amounts on the right. In the middle, text like PAYPAL *SPOTIFY AB 35314369001 or KARTENZAHLUNG 04.03. REWE SAGT DANKE 123456.

You know money came in. You know more money went out. But why? On what? Since when?

That is the financial information gap. Your bank has all your data. It just never turns it into an answer. So you guess. 🤷

Why an unsorted bank statement is annoying

The gap costs you real things:

• You forget a subscription you stopped using two years ago.
• You have no idea what "groceries" cost you per month. You only have a feeling.
• At tax time you scroll through hundreds of lines to find six of them.

None of this is hard. It is just boring. Nobody wants to sort 300 rows by hand.

What Pinke does with the list

Pinke reads your bank export and gives every line a name you chose. KARTENZAHLUNG REWE SAGT DANKE becomes Groceries. Then it draws the picture.

Right now Pinke can read exports from Revolut, DKB, Sparkasse, Postbank, Vivid, and Trade Republic — CSV or PDF, depending on the bank. Your bank is not on the list? On the upload page there is a section called "Bank not supported? Convert any export with your AI". It gives you a ready-made prompt. You paste your export into ChatGPT or Claude, get a clean CSV back, and upload that. Fair warning, and Pinke says it too: your data goes to that AI service, and assistants make mistakes. Check the file before you upload it.

Walkthrough: teach Pinke about your bakery

Say you buy bread every week. On your statement it looks like this:

04.03.2026   KARTENZAHLUNG BAECKEREI MOHN GMBH//BERLIN   -4,80 EUR
11.03.2026   KARTENZAHLUNG BAECKEREI MOHN GMBH//BERLIN   -5,20 EUR
18.03.2026   KARTENZAHLUNG BAECKEREI MOHN GMBH//BERLIN   -4,80 EUR

Three lines of noise. Let's fix that once, for good.

1. Upload the file. Go to /ingest. You see a dashed box that says "Click to upload or drag and drop". Drop your export in.

2. Look at what came back. A card appears with four numbers: Bank, Rows, Days, Balance. This is your sanity check. If it says 312 rows and your statement has 312 lines, good.

3. Sort it. Click the Analyze button. Pinke applies its rules and fills in categories.

4. Fix the bakery. Open one of the bakery rows in the table. A window opens with the transaction on top. Click Create rule, and you get a sentence to fill in:

> Set group ______, category ______, subcategory ______, and tags ______

Type it like a sentence. Group Living, category Groceries, subcategory Bakery.

5. Make it count for all of them. Below the sentence is a section called Rule actions with two checkboxes. Both start off. This is the important part:

• Apply to similar transactions — fixes the bakery rows you already have. Pick a Match field (Payee, Merchant, or Description) and Pinke shows you a preview of exactly which rows change before you commit.
• Save as future rule — stores the mapping, so next month's bread sorts itself.

Tick both. Then click Save.

6. Keep the file. Click Save on the file card to store the processed data.

That is the whole loop: upload, analyze, correct, save. You do the correcting once per merchant, not once per transaction — but only if you tick those boxes. They are off by default, because Pinke would rather ask than quietly rewrite 40 rows behind your back.

Where to look afterwards

Once your data is sorted, the pages get useful:

• /visualize/sunburst — a ring chart of your spending. The inner ring is the big groups, the outer rings break them down. Click a ring to zoom in, and use the Groups / Categories / Subcategories buttons to set how deep it goes. The page is titled Spenderella's Wheel, and clicking that title spins it. Yes, really. 🎡
• /visualize — the hub for the rest. The card names tell you the mood: Flow Mo' Show, The Balancing Act, Pie Hard: Expense Edition, The Paper Trail, The Subscription Trap™, Rewards, Portfolio Overview, and Tax Overview. The subscription one is the one that hurts.
• /rules — every rule you made, in one list, next to the built-in system rules. Add one with New rule. Each rule has a little magnifier button, Test rule against history, which tells you how many past transactions it would catch.
• /merchants — merchants and their aliases. Useful when the same shop shows up under three different spellings.
• /report — filter your transactions and hit Create report to get a document out of it.

About your data: the honest version

A lot of budgeting apps ask you to connect your live bank account. That means giving a company standing access to everything you do with money, often so they can show you a pie chart and sell you a credit card.

Pinke does not do that. There is no bank connection. You export a file yourself and upload that file. You decide what Pinke sees, and when.

But let's be precise, because "private" gets used loosely: Pinke runs on a server. When you upload a statement, that file goes to the server, gets processed there, and is stored with your account. It is not crunched inside your browser. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

What Pinke does promise is narrower and checkable:

• No analytics, no tracking cookies, no ads.
• Your uploads are used for one thing: showing you your own analysis.
• Your data is not sold.
• You can delete it. On /me there is Delete all files (keeps your profile) and Clear all data.

That last point matters most. A tool you can walk away from cleanly is a different kind of promise than a tool that just says "trust us".

The point

You should not need to be a spreadsheet person to know where your money goes.

The gap is not that the data is missing. You have all of it. The gap is that nobody bothered to make it readable.

Export one statement. Upload it at /ingest. Spend ten minutes naming your regular merchants. Then look at the wheel and find out what you actually spent on bread this year. 🥐