How to Connect Your Nigerian Bank Account to a Budgeting App

Most Nigerians with a salary have more than one bank. One account receives the pay. Another one, usually the app that works when the first one is down, does the daily spending. Maybe a third holds savings you are trying not to touch. Each bank sends its own debit alerts, and by the 20th of the month you have a few hundred of them and no idea what the month actually cost.

If that sounds like your phone, and you have tried to budget in a notebook or a spreadsheet but could not keep up with the alerts, this post is for you.

If you keep one account, spend mostly in cash and like writing things down, a budgeting app that connects to your bank will not add much. A notebook will do.

What connecting your bank means

Auritrack connects to Nigerian banks through Mono, a Nigerian company that provides open banking connections to apps. Mono's coverage in Nigeria is wide: around 340 institutions when we checked in October 2026. When you start a connection, Mono's window lists the banks it supports, so you can check yours there.

Bank connections are part of Auritrack's Premium plan, which costs $20 a month or $200 a year. The same plan connects banks in the US and Canada through Plaid, and selected banks in Ghana, Kenya and South Africa through Mono. The supported countries page keeps the full list.

How to connect, step by step

1. Sign in to Auritrack on the web or in the mobile app and go to connect your bank. You need to be on Premium.
2. Pick Nigeria as the country your bank is in. That matters if you also hold accounts abroad: Auritrack routes by where the bank is, not where you live.
3. Mono's window opens. Choose your bank and log in there, on Mono's screen, with your usual internet banking details.
4. Confirm the connection. Current and savings accounts become accounts in Auritrack with their balances, and card spending comes in as expenses.
5. Close the window. Your transactions start coming in, and the AI labels and categorizes them.

Repeat for each bank you use. Two or three connections side by side is normal.

What the app can see, and what it cannot

Auritrack can see the account name, the balance, and your transactions: the amount, the date and the description your bank wrote, such as "NIP TRANSFER" or "POS PURCHASE IKEJA". That is what it needs to build your budget.

Auritrack cannot see your internet banking password or PIN. You type those into Mono's screen, not ours, and Auritrack never receives or stores them. The connection is read-only, so it cannot send money, pay a bill, buy airtime or change anything at your bank. If you ever want to stop sharing, you remove the connection, and syncing for that bank stops.

How often it updates

Every connected account syncs once a week automatically, and that weekly sync is included in Premium. If you want it more often, you can set a faster schedule or press "Sync now" on an account, and those extra syncs cost Auricoins. We say this plainly because some apps imply minute-by-minute updates, and this is not that. For most people, a weekly picture plus a quick sync before a big purchase is plenty.

The GTBank-to-savings problem

Here is where most budgeting apps get Nigerian banking wrong. You move ₦150,000 from your GTBank salary account to your savings account at another bank. A simple app sees ₦150,000 leaving one account and ₦150,000 arriving in another, and records an expense and an income. Your spending for the month looks ₦150,000 worse than it was, and your income looks ₦150,000 better.

When both accounts are connected, Auritrack looks for that pattern: money out of one of your accounts and the same amount into another of your accounts within a few days, usually with transfer wording like "NIP" or "TRF" in the description. When it finds a pair, it moves both sides out of income and spending and records them as a transfer between your accounts. Your balances move, because the money did move, but your budget is not fooled. If it pairs something that was not a transfer, one tap on "Not a transfer" puts both transactions back and it remembers your answer.

This only works for accounts that are connected. If your second account is at a bank that is not on the list, upload its statement and you can sort that leg yourself.

What about banks that are not on the list?

You can use Auritrack with them too. Download a statement as a PDF, CSV or Excel file and upload it, and the AI reads it, builds the account and categorizes the transactions. That works with every bank, on every plan. If you later connect the same bank, the connection takes over the account the statement created instead of making a duplicate, and transactions that already came in from a statement are not added twice.

Cash needs a sentence. Type "paid ₦2,500 for suya" in the chat, in the app or on @auritrack_bot on Telegram, and it lands with the rest.

Three weeks later

Before: the debit alerts pile up across three banks, you check a balance, wince, and close the app without knowing why it is lower than you expected.

After: you open one dashboard on a Sunday evening. The week's spending from all three banks is already there, categorized. The ₦150,000 you moved to savings sits under transfers, not spending. A card asks you to confirm two charges that look like subscriptions, a streaming plan and a cloud storage plan you thought you had cancelled. You confirm one and cancel the other.

Your first step

Before connecting anything, open the free subscription tracker and list the subscriptions you think you pay for. It needs no account and takes five minutes.

Then create an Auritrack account, or get the app on Google Play or the App Store. On Premium, connect your Nigerian bank and see how much of your list it already knew about. If you are not ready for Premium, upload last month's statement and start there.