# How to see all your accounts in one place

> Salary in one bank, card spending in another, savings somewhere else. What it takes to get one number instead of four apps, and what to check before you set it up.

Source: https://trybica.com/guides/connect-all-your-banks-in-one-app/
Updated: 2026-08-18

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Almost nobody has one bank any more. There is the account the salary lands in, usually at whichever bank was nearest when you got your first job. There is a card from a digital bank, because the exchange rates were better that summer. There is a savings account somewhere paying slightly more, and possibly a joint account, and possibly certificates bought in a year when rates were good.

Each of those is perfectly visible on its own. The problem is that no single one of them can answer the question you actually have, which is how much you have and how much you are spending.

## What "one place" has to mean

Plenty of tools claim to unify accounts and deliver something less than that. Three things separate the ones that work:

**The balances are current without you.** If keeping the picture accurate means logging in somewhere and pressing refresh, the picture will be accurate for about a week. This is the single most common failure — not that the tool was bad, but that it depended on you.

**Transfers between your own accounts are not counted as spending.** Move €500 from your current account to your savings and a naive tool records €500 of spending, plus €500 of income. Do that monthly and every figure it produces is wrong in a way that is hard to spot and impossible to trust. This is worth testing deliberately: [why transfers are not spending](/guides/transfers-are-not-spending/) covers what to look for.

**The history goes back far enough to be useful.** A tool that starts collecting from the day you sign up cannot tell you anything about your spending for months. Most European banks will hand over a year or two of history at the point you connect, which means the patterns are visible immediately.

## How the connection works

You are not giving an app your banking password. Under European Open Banking rules, you pick your bank from a list, get handed to your bank's own login screen, approve which accounts to share, and come back. The app receives permission to read those accounts — balances and transaction history — and nothing more.

The access is read-only as a matter of what the permission contains, not as a matter of policy. Moving money is a separate permission under the same framework, granted separately, and a tool that reads your accounts does not hold it. [Is open banking safe](/guides/is-open-banking-safe/) walks the whole framework — who regulates it, what an app can and cannot do — if the connection step is what gives you pause.

Connections also expire on a schedule the framework sets, not the app, so expect to re-approve every few months. That is mildly annoying and it is the point: standing access that never lapses is exactly what you would not want.

## What to check before you commit

1. **Your specific banks.** Coverage varies. The large Portuguese retail banks and the well-known digital ones are widely supported, but smaller institutions and savings products often are not. Check yours by name before anything else.
2. **What happens to accounts nobody can connect to.** Certificados de Aforro, a mortgage, a car loan, property — these do not arrive over Open Banking. If the tool has no way to hold them, its net worth figure is missing the parts that matter most.
3. **How the tool makes money.** A transaction list is an unusually detailed record of a person's life. If you are not paying, it is worth knowing what is.
4. **How you get your data back out.** Export matters more than anyone expects it to, and you find out it is missing at the worst possible moment.

## The number you get at the end

The point of consolidating is not tidiness. It is that a handful of questions become answerable in seconds instead of being permanently postponed: what did I spend last month, what is leaving every month whether or not I do anything, what am I actually worth once the loans are subtracted.

Those questions are not hard. They are just spread across four apps, and the arithmetic of adding them up by hand is tedious enough that nobody does it twice. Everything downstream — [where your money goes](/guides/where-your-money-goes/), [what your net worth actually is](/guides/calculate-net-worth/) — starts from having the whole picture in one place first.