Most budgeting apps want to log into your bank. finbreak reads your statements instead — the CSV, OFX or PDF files your bank already gives you — and works out where your money went from those.

There is no bank linking, no account to sign up for, and no financial data leaving your computer. The one exception is an update check, and it is off by default: switch it on and finbreak looks for a newer version and installs it only after checking the download is genuinely signed. Leave it off and the app never touches the internet at all.

What it does

Imports a pile of statements at once. A year of monthly PDFs, a mix of formats, password-protected files — it asks up front for anything it genuinely cannot get past, then works through the rest and shows you one screen: every file, where it is going, how many transactions are new, how many are duplicates you already have, and how many lines it could not read. Nothing is written until you press Import.

Files them itself. It reads the account number printed on a statement and pre-selects the matching account, telling you why. If it has not seen the account before, it offers to create it. Where it cannot be sure, it says so and leaves the choice to you rather than guessing.

Sorts transactions into categories — up to three levels deep — with built-in guesses for common shops and services, your own rules on top, and corrections it learns from. Every guess is tagged, so you can see what it decided and overrule it.

Spots money moving between your own accounts, so a transfer from your current account to savings is not counted as both spending and income.

Spots what repeats — subscriptions, debit orders, your salary — and suggests them for you to confirm, so you can see at a glance what is on autopilot.

Projects where you are heading. The Forecast tab starts from a real closing balance rather than an estimate, brings it up to date, and draws the line to the end of the month or 30, 60 or 90 days out, using the repeating money you have confirmed. It names any account it left out and why.

Checks the numbers add up. Each account is marked ✓ when your imported transactions bridge one statement's closing balance to the next, or ⚠ with the amount it is off by — so a missing or double import does not go unnoticed.

The dashboard

It opens by telling you in a sentence what the month actually did: "September cost you R2,340 more than your usual month. Most of it was one thing — Vet, R1,900 more than usual."

It stays quiet when a month is ordinary, says "so far" while one is still running, and says nothing at all rather than guessing when there is not yet enough history to know what usual means.

Below that, spending, income and transfers sit side by side. Each opens down from a category to a single shop to the individual purchases. An alerts button lights up when something is worth a look — a new recurring charge, a category well above its usual, an expected debit that never posted.

Privacy and safety

Your data sits in an encrypted, password-protected vault. When you create it, finbreak shows you a recovery code once. Keep it somewhere safe: if you forget your master password, the code opens the vault and lets you choose a new one. finbreak keeps no copy, so losing both the code and the password still means losing the vault. You can decline the code, or replace or remove it later.

Copied amounts and descriptions are cleared from the clipboard after a short while. Repeated wrong unlock attempts are slowed down. Account numbers show as dots plus the last four digits, so a glance or a screenshot never gives one away.

You can export a PDF report — your choice of sections, accounts and period — and lock the file with its own password. Backups are encrypted, checked before you rely on them, and can be restored onto a new master password.

Where it stands

Stable, with more still planned. This is finbreak's first stable release. Your vault, your backups and your saved import settings will keep working with every update in this series.