Reader shares his budgeting experience with iBank and Singapore Bank’s transaction format

I did an article sometime back teaching readers how to plan, create and use a budgeting software in 10 steps and its been a very popular topic primarily because it is something most people would always want to make sense of.

One of my readers YYT shares with us some really interesting comparison of how each Singapore bank stack up in their support for electronic bank statements.

For International Readers info, a lot of web budgeting apps like Quicken and Mint allows automatic pulling of transactions from banks. Perhaps international users don’t have that luxury.

YYT uses the iBANK for MAC which looks to be very powerful. It allows offline sync to your iPhone through WEBDav and allows you to plan using the envelope budgeting method.

Here are his thoughts:

For Mac users, guys might wanna try iBank, Moneywell, Quicken for Mac to track your bank accounts.

Personally I’m on iBank. It also an app for your iPhone to track your expenses on the go. You can then sync it with the program when you’re back homoe. Haven’t tried that yet though…haha, not on an iPhone yet

My tracking involves exporting all my monthly bank statements into either OFX or CSV formats, then import them into iBank. iBanks can then “learn” frequent transactions and categories them automatically this is what I like haha.

Some additional notes regarding exporting bank accts/Credit card statements from local bank:

Citi accts/CC – variety of formats OFX, csv, qif, etc
DBS accts – only csv format
UOB accts/CC – csv, BUT with a .xls extension
SCB accts/CC – csv and pdf format

I believe citi has the best online platform out there so far. Formatting is consistent and most imptly the data is easily exported with inter-operability high on their minds. You can easily import their data to any financial softwares.

DBS and SCBs are not that bad, at least they standardize their export formatting (i.e. CC statements and Savings statements looks relatively the same).

UOB can really really work on thier online platform.
The exported data for Accounts and Credit Cards are formated so differently, which is a pain in the *** when you try to parse it.

Haha, so hope this helps in the audit trail too for pple on the Mac.

[Read How to create a budget plan in 10 easy steps >>]

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Kyith

Kyith is the Owner and Sole Writer behind Investment Moats. Readers tune in to Investment Moats to learn and build stronger, firmer wealth foundations, how to have a Passive investment strategy, know more about investing in REITs and the nuts and bolts of Active Investing.

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Kyith worked as an IT operations engineer from 2004 to 2019. Currently, he works as a Senior Solutions Specialist in Insurance Start-up Havend. All opinions on Investment Moats are his own and does not represent the views of Providend.

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