Yes? I'm a USian living in the UK, so I've got 2 "active" credit cards and 2 "active" bank accounts. When I get my monthly statement, I take 2-3 minutes to skim through the transactions. That's 10-15 minutes per month. Given that a bogus transaction could be in the thousands, I think that's a sensible precaution. In addition to catching any unexpected transactions, it gives me a quick overview of how much I've spent this month and on what, so I can maybe factor that in to how much I spend in the next month.

And it's a heck of a lot less time than I spend on HackerNews. :-D

Yes, of course. I keep my receipts, and when my statement comes in I compare one to the other. That plus everything else I do that could qualify as "accounting" (except tax returns) comes in at probably less than half an hour per month, and saved me a couple of hundred dollars when someone stole my credit card number (plus however much more they would have taken if I hadn't cancelled the card when I found out).

Nope, but I do note in an app every time I make a transaction, and on which account it was charged to.

At the end of the statement month, I can compare totals, and if they match, I don't need to review anything else.

Maintaining any kind of budget requires tracking spending, so this isn't really a big deal if you practice any kind of proactive financial management.

It sounds like you are saying you essentially keep your own personal ledger of every charge you make, and then reconcile the total against the statement each month.

When I did this using MS Money or Quicken years ago, it took so much time to reconcile each month that I eventually gave up. And that was with automatically downloading transactions!

The idea that you could do this in a notes app and actually end up with an exactly matching total in app with the statement, where you don’t have to go back and review each transaction to figure out what you missed, is entirely implausible to me. First of all because the sheer number of scheduled recurring charges which may not be a fixed amount, second because the sheer number of quick charges that are run in a day where I am not stopping to open an app and record the total, third because my wife has a card on the same statement and even still sometimes borrows mine, forth of all because things like Amazon charges aren’t always totaled correctly when you first checkout (“estimated taxes”) and even then the total price on the invoice can be split across multiple charges, fifth of all because of various refunds which might occur due to a return made by someone else in the family for a purchase from a previous month, and similarly for orders placed on one day which aren’t shipped and charged until a future statement.

It’s an absolutely huge deal to precisely track your spending so well that the total balance in your personal tracker exactly matches your statement such that you don’t have to look at every charge on the statement and mentally account for it. It’s literally a multi-billion dollar problem and market opportunity.

It's honestly trivial for me. I use a budgeting app (YNAB) that downloads transactions daily, and spend maybe 15 minutes a week total on it. I don't even record most transactions on the fly, but I know where we've used our cards and 95% of transactions I can quickly verify as correct.

That said, the frequent download is a crucial part. If I had to do this on a monthly basis it would be much harder because I'd have to put in an hour of work all at once.