Getting Started with PrivLedge app
PrivLedge is our privacy-first iOS and macOS app that turns bank statements into a complete, tax-ready financial picture. No bank logins, no credentials handed to a third party — you import statement files, and everything that happens next happens on your device.
This post walks through the full workflow: import, reconcile, categorize, report.
Is the name misspelt?
PrivLedge combines Private and Ledger — because financial records should stay private while remaining accurately reconciled and ready when needed.
Who is it for?
PrivLedge is built for freelancers, sole proprietors, and salaried individuals. At setup you pick a profile — Freelance Pro or Salaried Employee — and the relevant tax calculations and Home-screen features adapt to your income type. You can change your profile type anytime from Settings; your existing transactions and categories are unaffected. Because it works on statement files rather than a live bank connection, it’s just as happy processing last year’s statements as this month’s.
Step 1 — Import your statements
Export a statement from your bank — PDF, CSV, or XLSX all work — and open it in PrivLedge. The app tries to identify the bank format and parse the full transaction table; if it cannot identify the bank confidently, you can choose it yourself. Password-protected PDFs prompt you inline for the password.
Two safety nets run on every import:
- Duplicate detection — transactions with the same date, amount, and description within a 3-day window are flagged before they’re saved, so re-importing an overlapping statement won’t double-count anything.
- Balance verification — PrivLedge cross-checks the running balance across the parsed rows. If rows are missing or spurious, the import is marked Unverified instead of silently accepted.
Step 2 — Reconcile
The reconciliation workspace shows the running balance in real time, with any discontinuity highlighted. From here you can drag to reorder same-date transactions, edit amounts, or delete spurious rows until the balance is clean.
Two shortcuts resolve the most common statement gaps in a couple of taps: snap the closing balance to the computed value, or back-calculate the opening balance from a reference closing balance.
Every imported statement is logged in the statement history with its bank, date range, transaction count, and reconciliation status — tap any entry to re-open its workspace later.
Step 3 — Categorize
You can assign every transaction to an Income Tax category — professional receipts, business expenses, capital gains, tax-free income — so your records are easier to review at filing time.
PrivLedge Pro can train a private, on-device ML classifier from your corrections. After you have enough corrected transactions to train a model, you can use it to suggest categories in batches. No sync or upload is involved in that learning: the model lives and learns on your device.
Step 4 — Read your tax reports
With transactions categorized and balances reconciled, the reports do the rest:
- Estimated tax — your liability calculated from categorized transactions, with the applicable slab applied and advance-tax installments broken out.
- Tax-readiness score — a live measure of how much of your history is categorized and reconciled, so you know exactly where you stand before filing.
- Tax insights — actionable flags from the rules engine: presumptive income eligibility, cash-receipts ratio warnings, receipts threshold proximity, and more.
Reports are scoped per tax year — switch years with a single tap and everything (reports, insights, scores) follows.
A word on privacy
This is the part we sweat the most. Parsing, ML training, and report generation happen on your device. By default, your data stays local. The app can optionally lock behind Face ID / Touch ID (with passcode fallback) so someone else using your device cannot open it. On iPhone and iPad, the local database uses the operating system’s file-protection layer; on Mac, storage protection depends on FileVault. Pro users can opt into iCloud Sync between their devices, which uses their private CloudKit container.
Get it
Learn more on the PrivLedge product page, where you’ll also find support and the privacy policy. If you have a statement format PrivLedge doesn’t recognise yet, tell us — the format registry grows with every report.
PrivLedge’s categories, reconciliation results, and reports are tools to help you review your records; they are not tax, accounting, or legal advice, and they are not an official tax filing.