The five ways in
Badlen connects to no bank, so everything you own reaches it one of five ways. Which one depends on what you have in front of you, not on the account it belongs to.
Badlen reads no CSV, OFX or QIF file, and has no screen to drop a bank statement on. A statement gets in through an assistant that reads it for you, or through a file you shape into Badlen’s own format. How it stays current covers what is missing.
Pick by what you have
Section titled “Pick by what you have”| What you have | The way in |
|---|---|
| A balance read off your bank’s app or a passbook | By hand: an account and its balance |
| Funds, ETFs or shares in a PEA, a securities account or a contract | By hand: one line per ISIN, then its dated orders if any |
| A property, with its loan | By hand: the property sheet |
| A public crypto address | By hand once; the chain fills it from then on |
| Statements, in whatever form your bank or broker hands them out | With your assistant |
| A Badlen export, or data you can write in Badlen’s JSON format | From a file |
| A program of your own that should write on a schedule | The REST API, with an API key |
Start with the forms to create the accounts and state their balances, then bring in the assistant for the history of the accounts that move.
The five ways in short
Section titled “The five ways in short”By hand. The add screen, /ajouter, opens a form per kind of account: a dated
balance, a cash pocket, a line per ISIN, a property sheet, a wallet address. Operations
are typed one at a time on an account, and a dated buy or sell on a line. There is nothing
to set up: it is the only way that needs nothing outside the browser.
By hand says which form takes what.
With your assistant. An MCP client you already use reads your statements on your machine, under your own model, and hands Badlen operations that are already extracted. It can create accounts, state balances, add lines and import whole statements, deduplicated, after a dry run that shows what would be written. It is the way for history, and it needs an API key and Node on the machine the client runs on. With your assistant sets it up.
From a file. Settings → Data → Import a file reads a JSON file in Badlen’s export format and merges it into your account. It is meant for restoring a backup, but it accepts a file you wrote or converted yourself just as well. It needs no key and no client, and every row is matched against what exists before it is written, so the same file sent twice adds nothing. From a file describes the format.
The REST API. Thirteen routes under /api/v1, reached with a scoped API key, five of
which write: create an account, state a balance, add a line, import a batch of operations
and its dry run. The assistant uses exactly these; a script of yours can too.
REST API lists them.
The chain. A crypto wallet declared by its public address fetches its own balance, at creation and every time you press Sync. It is the one thing that enters Badlen without anybody typing a figure. Crypto wallets describes it.
Whichever way a figure came in, it is corrected the same way, from the tab that holds it: Fix a mistake.