Introducing Bank Sync: The latest addition to Aspire Budgeting

I am excited to announce the launch of our newest product, Bank Sync. This powerful new tool allows you to connect your bank accounts directly to Aspire Budgeting and automatically import your transactions.

Many of you already know the story, but Aspire Budgeting started as a simple spreadsheet I created for myself. It was everything I wanted in a budgeting tool - easy to use, customizable, plus a design I found intuitive and fun. Within a few weeks, I realized this was not just a tool for me, but for others as well. This led to the creation of a website, Reddit community, and so on. Fast forward to today and Aspire Budgeting has gone through several iterations, updates, and redesigns. And the community is 7,000 members strong and growing every day.

New features have been slow to come over the past year or two as I had to take a step back to work through the pandemic, burnout, a job loss, career change, and a few other difficult life events. Thankfully, things started to settle back down in the fall of last year and I found myself with the time and energy to move Aspire Budgeting forward with some fresh ideas and features.

This led to the creation of Bank Sync. While manual entry has always worked well for me, I found myself getting very tired of visiting all my bank's websites and entering in the data manually. This led me to building a proof of concept importer and once I got started, I knew it was time to push Aspire Budgeting to the next level and implement one of its oldest feature requests: automatic transaction importing. I started planning this feature early last fall and am so excited that it's finally ready for all of you.

Screenshot of our new add-on

FAQs

What is Bank Sync?

Bank Sync is a new product under the Aspire Budgeting umbrella. For about $7/month, you can reclaim all the time and effort it takes to manually add your transactions data to your spreadsheet. Bank Sync is not only quicker, it's also more accurate. By fetching transactions data directly from your bank, it eliminates typos and other mistakes that may impact your budget and reconciliation process.

Is Bank Sync a free product?

Bank Sync is not a free product. To create Bank Sync and make it function well, there had to be lots of work done behind the scenes to create a backend infrastructure and establish partnerships with third-party providers. The result is a robust product with excellent features for what I believe is a great price of $79/year.

Is there a monthly payment option?

Not right now. This is the first paid product Aspire Budgeting has offered since it began in 2018. We're taking things slow to start off but perhaps down the road there will be more payment options.

Does Bank Sync work with my existing data?

Yes, Bank Sync will likely work seamlessly with your existing data. Any pre-existing data in the Aspire Budgeting spreadsheet will be treated as if it was previously imported through Bank Sync. However, there may be some minor cleanup required, such as deleting the initial balance when adding an account. And it's probably good to be aware that some of your most recent transactions may be matched using our matching algorithm. As long as you haven't made any significant changes to the original spreadsheet, everything should work smoothly.

Is the Aspire Budgeting template still free?

Absolutely. I created Aspire Budgeting to help others with their finances and that's still the core mission of this business. Our templates will always be free to use - that's a promise I made years ago and that's not changing. There are even new features and products in the works that will be free to everyone, regardless of whether or not you pay for Bank Sync.

Is Bank Sync available outside of the United States?

No. We only support financial institutions within the United States for the time being.

Do you have a roadmap?

I don't have a public roadmap to share at the moment, but I do have a small infographic down below that I hope will shed a tiny bit of light on what I'm planning for the remainder of 2023.

Where can I learn more?

Check out the new AspireBudget.com website. It has been completely revamped to provide you with all the details. You can also check out our Help Center to learn more about Bank Sync and how to get started.