Maintain edits to spread sheet after Power Query Save & Close

Basil_58 

First of all, it's good to see another person who downloads CSVs from various banks and incorporates them into a single database (you do that, right?). I do the same. I do it in Excel for Mac, where I don't have access to Power Query, however, so maybe I've been saved from the quandary you describe.

In my case also, though, I recognize that the various CSVs layouts from the various banks and credit card companies all are slightly different. I just manually get them all to the same set of five columns and then bring them into a master XLSX spreadsheet, doing so each month.

Once there, I go through all the transactions and assign budget categories, differentiating between income categories and expense categories......(adding columns of my own devising only in the master sheet). I then use a Pivot Table to produce a monthly report, showing month-by-month income and expenses in each category. I can do year--to-year comparisons as well. I never over-write anything from the past; the new data is always just being appended to the bottom of the historical record.

So that manual process takes a few minutes per bank account (6 of them altogether), but it's down to a good routine. The budget categorization takes longer, frankly.......

I just destroy the CSV files, once I've incorporated the data into the master Excel--is that not what you do? Why not? What's the reason for retaining them?

So help me understand what it is that you're doing that's different; what it is that you're trying to resolve.