Why manual import
15 minutes a month, on purpose.
Most personal-finance apps pull your transactions in the background. You open them, glance at the dashboard, close them, and your behavior doesn’t change. GlidePath works differently, by design. About once a month, you log into each bank, click “Download transactions,” and drop the file in your GlidePath folder. That’s real friction — and it’s the point: we don’t make caring about your money effortless, we make it worth it. Here’s the deliberate case for why.
Four reasons we keep the review step visible.
Auto-sync can make review easier to skip.
Background sync is convenient, but it can turn money into a dashboard you glance at instead of a file you review. GlidePath keeps a small ritual: bring in the file, see what changed, and approve the import before it becomes part of your plan.
Manual import makes freshness visible.
Connected feeds can lag, break, or duplicate rows without making the problem obvious. Manual import is simpler to audit: either this file was imported, or it was not. The app can show current readings, saved monthly snapshots, and carry-forward rows instead of pretending every balance has the same freshness.
Privacy you can verify, not just trust.
Bank-login sync requires a third-party connection layer. GlidePath’s core data lives in files on your computer — you can open them, copy them, back them up, and see exactly what’s there. Optional online helpers are separate and named before use.
You’re already there once a month.
Bill pay, statements, mobile deposits — many households already log into bank sites around month-end. Adding “download transactions” to that session is still work, but it keeps the work tied to a financial check-in instead of a background feed you may not notice.
The honest version of the tradeoff: if 15 minutes a month is a dealbreaker, Simplifi or Monarch may be a better fit. We don’t think less of that choice — and if you want planning depth on top, GlidePath reads the monthly CSV exports those tools generate, so you can run them side by side.
The file format
“CSVs? Really — aren’t those ancient?”
Fair question. But that’s the point. CSV files are simple, universal, and work everywhere — no special software, no proprietary format, no drama.
Think about it — we still use plain old .txt files every single day, and
those are about as old as computers themselves. Why? Because simple just works.
Sure, there are fancier options like JSON, XML, or full-on databases. But for straightforward tabular data, fancy just means more things that can go wrong. CSVs are boring in the best possible way — transparent, easy to inspect, and dead simple to maintain.
Old school? Maybe. Reliable? Absolutely. Sometimes the old-school option is old-school because it just works.
Already using Simplifi or Monarch? Keep them.
You don’t actually have to pick. If you already pay for an aggregator that auto-links your bank accounts and tracks daily transactions, keep it. GlidePath sits on top — same monthly review ritual, applied to the numbers your aggregator already knows about.
Every major aggregator exports CSV. Once a month, drop the file in your GlidePath DataFolder and the Net Worth, Spending, and Cash-Flow pages fill in automatically — planning-grade math (Monte Carlo, Tax Valley, BT tracking, SS scenarios) on the same numbers, no double bookkeeping.
Auto-detected on import: Simplifi · Monarch · Mint · YNAB, plus direct CSV downloads from Chase · Bank of America · Wells Fargo · Discover · Capital One · Citi · Amex. Anything else comes in through the universal column-mapper: you match the columns once and it remembers.