How to track all your bank accounts in one place

1. List every place your money actually sits

Start on paper, not in an app. Write down every account you hold. Most people undercount by two or three — the salary account from a previous job, an old PPF, a credit card kept only for its lounge access.

• Bank accounts — salary, savings, joint, dormant ones included
• Credit and debit cards — each issuer separately
• Investments — mutual funds, stocks, EPF, PPF, NPS, gold, FDs
• Insurance — term, health, motor, and any employer-provided cover
• Loans — home, car, personal, education, and any card EMI

This list is the definition of "done". Without it you will build a dashboard that looks complete while quietly missing a third of your money — which is worse than no dashboard, because you will trust it.

2. Gather one recent statement per account

A single recent statement per account is enough to establish the account, its balance and a few months of history. Every Indian bank and card issuer emails these monthly as a password-protected PDF, and all of them let you download one from netbanking.

Opening those PDFs is where most people stall, because every bank uses a different password format. We wrote it all down: statement password and download guides for every major Indian bank →

3. Import them into one dashboard

Upload each statement. Ekatra classifies the document, extracts the rows and files them under the right account — a bank statement becomes accounts and transactions, a card statement becomes a card and its dues, a mutual fund statement becomes holdings, a policy document becomes insurance.

Re-uploading the same file updates rather than duplicates, and an account written slightly differently on two statements collapses onto one account instead of forking a second. So you can be careless about order and repeats.

4. Add what has no statement

Cash, PPF, NPS, physical gold, property, a loan from family — these rarely arrive as a parseable document. Add them by hand. It is the least fun step and the one that decides whether your net worth figure is true or merely tidy.

5. Check coverage, then keep it current

Go back to your paper list and confirm every line is present. Then keep it fresh — either re-import monthly, or leave email import connected so new statements flow in as they arrive.

What you get once it is all in

This is the part that makes the ten minutes worth it — things that are simply invisible when your money lives in eight different apps:

• A true net worth — assets minus liabilities, with card dues and loan outstanding counted properly rather than ignored.
• Every due date in one queue — card payments, EMIs, insurance renewals and recurring charges, ordered by what bites first.
• Spending you can actually see — categorised across all accounts, so the total is real rather than per-app.
• Card benefits you are not using — perks matched against your annual fee, so you know which cards earn their keep.
• Subscriptions you forgot — recurring charges detected from transaction patterns.

What this costs you in privacy

Consolidation means one place holds a lot about you, so the handling matters more than the feature list. Ekatra never asks for netbanking passwords, discards statement files after parsing, keeps any Gmail grant read-only and narrow, and lets you export everything or delete it outright. The full detail is here, including where Ekatra is not yet strong.