Once Monobank is connected to Budgie, most of the bookkeeping does itself: purchases arrive on their own and land in categories, transfers between your own cards stop looking like spending, and your monthly budget fills in as you pay. Here is what happens at each step, and where you still have the last word.
This guide starts where setup ends. If Monobank is not connected yet, follow how to get a Monobank token and connect it first: it takes about two minutes and helps you choose how much history to load.
After that, every card and jar you picked is its own account in Budgie, grouped under Monobank, with a switch to pause any of them. Everything below happens without another tap.
Budgie fetches new Monobank transactions every time you open the app or come back to it, and it also checks in the background from time to time. How often those background checks run is up to your phone’s system, so opening the app is the quickest way to see a purchase you have just made.
Each transaction comes in with the merchant name and the amount, plus the comment if you left one in Monobank. Transactions that are already in Budgie are recognised, so a new sync never adds them twice.
Every card payment carries a merchant category code, a four-digit number that tells what kind of business took the money: a supermarket, a pharmacy, a taxi. Budgie knows a default category for about 1,050 of these codes, so a payment at Silpo is already in Groceries before you ever open it. See automatic categories from merchant codes.
The switch lives in Settings, under General: Auto-assign categories from MCC. It is on by default. Turn it off if you would rather choose every category yourself; the change applies to transactions that arrive after it.
Whatever still has no category is counted in the Missing categories pill above your transaction list, and the Categorize screen lets you sort those transactions in bulk.
Merchant codes are broad: a supermarket code does not know you bought a gift there. When you want a merchant handled your way every time, use a rule. A rule can look at the merchant name, the comment, the amount, the account, the merchant code or the transaction type, and it sets a category, adds tags, or both.
Rules run on every new Monobank transaction, and a rule’s category wins over the merchant-code default. You rarely have to write one from scratch: change the category or the tags of a transaction and a Quick rule pill appears above the amount. Tap it, and the rule is saved for that merchant. See categorization rules.
Topping up a jar from your card shows up twice: once as money leaving the card and once as money arriving in the jar. Counted as is, that looks like a purchase you never made. Budgie finds such pairs between your own accounts and merges each one into a single transfer, which counts as neither spending nor income.
A merged transfer keeps its originals: open it and tap View source transactions to see both, or Revert to split them again. When a pair is not clear enough, Budgie leaves both transactions as they arrived instead of guessing. More in transfer pair detection.
When Monobank charges a commission on a transaction, Budgie splits it off into a separate line in Bank Fees & Charges. The payment keeps its real amount, the fee still counts as spending, and it stays in place even when the payment is merged into a transfer. Over a month you see exactly how much went to the bank.
Budgets in Budgie are monthly: one overall limit plus limits for the categories you care about. Every categorized Monobank purchase counts toward them as soon as it arrives, so the budget shows what is spent and what is left without you typing anything.
If you loaded a few months of history when you connected, creating a budget offers a Suggested option built from your recent spending, so your first limits come from real numbers. Turn on Budget alerts in Settings to get a notification at 80% and at 100% of a limit. See budget planning.
Analytics breaks your spending down by category and by tag for the period you pick. Transfers between your own accounts stay out and bank fees stay in, so the totals match what actually left your pocket. See spending analytics.
Not for your Monobank cards and jars. Cash, and accounts at banks Budgie does not sync, still need to be added by hand or imported from a file.
No. A top-up from your card to a jar is merged into one transfer between your own accounts, and budgets and analytics leave transfers out.
Yes. Switch off Auto-assign categories from MCC in Settings, under General. Your rules keep working either way.
Yes. Budgie checks for new transactions in the background, at a pace your phone’s system decides. Open the app to fetch the latest ones right away.
No. Your phone requests your data from Monobank directly and keeps it on the device. Budgie has no server of its own that receives your transactions.
2026-10-14
Where to get your personal Monobank token, how to paste it into Budgie, how much history to load, and what to do when a sync stops.
Read article→2025-01-27
A detailed technical analysis of how cloud-based budgeting apps collect, share, and expose your financial data through Plaid integrations, data breaches, and third-party aggregation.
Read article→Join the Budgie waitlist and be the first to experience truly private expense tracking.
Join Waitlist
