🚀 Getting Started

1. Select a folder — In the app you choose or create a folder (e.g., "StatementLock_Data") — this is where your rules, cached data, and reports are saved locally.

⚠️ Important: Choose a folder on your local drive — NOT inside iCloud Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google Drive. Cloud-synced folders can corrupt the app's cached data files. On Mac, create a folder called StatementLock_Data in your home directory.

2. Drop your PDFs — In the app you drag bank and credit card statements onto the drop zone. You can drop multiple files at once — they process sequentially with a short pause between each.

3. Review your data — The Overview tab shows income, expenses, net cash flow, and spending breakdown. Use the Categories and Accounts tabs to drill into details.

Supported formats: downloaded or scanned PDF statements from most major US banks and card issuers. Statements downloaded from your bank's website read best — they're smaller, sharper, and figures come through cleanly. A clear, straight scan of a paper statement works too; the app checks the totals either way and tells you if they don't add up. The app auto-detects the statement type and issuer.

Scanning a paper statement? Scan in black and white, not colour — a colour scan is often too large to send. Keep the page flat and straight, use 300 dpi, and put every page in one PDF. Then check the figures the app shows against the ones printed on your statement — on a long statement a scan can misread a digit, and the app will mark it Doesn't reconcile rather than accept it quietly.

Name your statements once, when you download them. Banks often give every statement the same name, or a long string of numbers. Rename each PDF as soon as you download it, using the same pattern every time — the bank, the account and the month, like MyBank-Checking-2026-01.pdf or MyBank-Visa-2026-01.pdf.

After that, don’t rename it. StatementLock knows a statement by its file name: dropping the same file in again is how it knows to re-read it, and a renamed copy is read as a first attempt instead. If the renamed copy isn’t identical to the one you already loaded, it is kept as a second statement and its transactions are counted twice — the Files tab tells you when that happens, and × removes the one you don’t want.

If a statement doesn’t load correctly — its figures don’t add up, or transactions look wrong or missing — drop the same PDF in again. The second reading uses a more capable AI model, and it keeps the merchant names and categories you’ve set and any totals you typed in. A second reading counts as another statement analysis against your plan, the same as the first.

Don’t delete the statement first. Deleting removes your edits along with it, and the next reading would start again on the standard model. If the second reading changes a figure on a row you had edited, that one edit can’t be matched to it and the Files tab tells you so.

Delete it first only if the app refused the statement after reading it — the Files tab says it looks like an investment account — and you’re sure it is a bank or card statement. Until you delete it there, dropping it again is refused from that record without being sent. Deleting is also how you remove a file you dropped by mistake.

If it still doesn’t load correctly, use Feedback → "A statement didn’t load correctly" so we can look at it.

Browser requirement: a Chromium-based browser such as Chrome, which supplies the File System Access API the app uses for local storage.