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I used to log every spending in an expense manager before but found it redundant. Now I've built a selenium utility that logs into my bank account every morning

I used to log every spending in an expense manager before but found it redundant. Now I've built a selenium utility that logs into my bank account every morning (deployed on cloud), calculates my last day's spending and remaining budget and sends me an sms at 8:30 on how much I've left to spend today and savings projection! Haven't touched any finance app ever since

jakubgarfield 9y ago
How do you deal with investments and transfers into savings account? When I track my expenses I want to ignore them – as I set a budget to spend $1000 this month. Savings are not really an investment but if I transfer $500 into savings it's hard to track the budget – maybe some reference code could help with that.
- coldfire 9y ago
  I only keep my monthly spending budget in current account, and everything else ("savings", pay, rent etc) goes to the savings account. And for this utility I only monitor current account which is directly linked to my cards so works pretty well for me. My bank in ANZ so they have this setup by default.
  - jakubgarfield 9y ago
    I just looked into it and it seems that Kiwibank doesn't provide any API access (you can download exports manually thought). ANZ might be a good option then :)
    - boulos 9y ago
      That's why he was saying he runs selenium to scrape it. Basically zero banks provide an API access to non-partnering institutions.
      - jakubgarfield 9y ago
        I missed the part about selenium scraping – thanks for pointing that out. There has just been a project submitted to solve this on HN – https://blog.teller.io/2017/06/12/the-api-for-your-bank-account-is-here.html https://blog.teller.io/2017/06/12/the-api-for-your-bank-acco... But it seems to support only a handful of UK banks – no ANZ or Kiwibank.
- creepydata 9y ago
  This is where different accounts with automatic direct deposit really shines. My paycheck is directed several different ways - I have a household bills account, a savings account, and a daily spend account. My paycheck gets allocated to each account automatically. No thinking required, if it's in my daily spend account it's been allocated for spending. Once the money is in my savings account I do choose to reallocate the extra (beyond emergency fund) to long term investments.
  - jakubgarfield 9y ago
    Nice approach – we don't separate between the that many accounts and it is harder to automatically track the spendings afterwards.
    - creepydata 9y ago
      The other thing is if you put all your bill money in a separate account automatically you don't even really feel like you're paying bills psychologically, you just get used to the money in your spending account being the only money you have. This is especially good with larger less frequent bills, just amortized them per paycheck. For example, I usually use around three tanks of oil a year. The oil bill comes frequently in the winter but only once in the summer (my water is heated with oil). the oil is amortized to ~$60 a paycheck. That $60 goes directly from my paycheck into the "bills account" every pay and I never worry about the oil bill, when it comes I pay it from the already allocated bills account. It's also impossible to go over budget without noticing, you'd have to take the difference out of the savings account. If your budget is wrong you'll notice immediately. That's just my approach though, and it works for me. Other people may have different methods that work for them.
qwerty2020 9y ago
Interesting. Care to share the code behind the utility?
bdcravens 9y ago
I wrote a number of Selenium scripts for grabbing credit card details, etc, but Wells Fargo seems to have pretty good anti-Selenium protection built in - even when my traffic seemed indistinguishable from organic browsing, it wouldn't let me log in.
jklinger410 9y ago
I use Mint.
- virmundi 9y ago
  I do too. I find it odd that it took them so long to properly account for savings. They booked the transaction as a loss in my checking and a gain in my account, but flagged it as over spending.

jakubgarfield 9y ago

How do you deal with investments and transfers into savings account? When I track my expenses I want to ignore them – as I set a budget to spend $1000 this month. Savings are not really an investment but if I transfer $500 into savings it's hard to track the budget – maybe some reference code could help with that.

coldfire 9y ago
I only keep my monthly spending budget in current account, and everything else ("savings", pay, rent etc) goes to the savings account. And for this utility I only monitor current account which is directly linked to my cards so works pretty well for me. My bank in ANZ so they have this setup by default.
- jakubgarfield 9y ago
  I just looked into it and it seems that Kiwibank doesn't provide any API access (you can download exports manually thought). ANZ might be a good option then :)
  - boulos 9y ago
    That's why he was saying he runs selenium to scrape it. Basically zero banks provide an API access to non-partnering institutions.
    - jakubgarfield 9y ago
      I missed the part about selenium scraping – thanks for pointing that out. There has just been a project submitted to solve this on HN – https://blog.teller.io/2017/06/12/the-api-for-your-bank-account-is-here.html https://blog.teller.io/2017/06/12/the-api-for-your-bank-acco... But it seems to support only a handful of UK banks – no ANZ or Kiwibank.
creepydata 9y ago
This is where different accounts with automatic direct deposit really shines. My paycheck is directed several different ways - I have a household bills account, a savings account, and a daily spend account. My paycheck gets allocated to each account automatically. No thinking required, if it's in my daily spend account it's been allocated for spending. Once the money is in my savings account I do choose to reallocate the extra (beyond emergency fund) to long term investments.
- jakubgarfield 9y ago
  Nice approach – we don't separate between the that many accounts and it is harder to automatically track the spendings afterwards.
  - creepydata 9y ago
    The other thing is if you put all your bill money in a separate account automatically you don't even really feel like you're paying bills psychologically, you just get used to the money in your spending account being the only money you have. This is especially good with larger less frequent bills, just amortized them per paycheck. For example, I usually use around three tanks of oil a year. The oil bill comes frequently in the winter but only once in the summer (my water is heated with oil). the oil is amortized to ~$60 a paycheck. That $60 goes directly from my paycheck into the "bills account" every pay and I never worry about the oil bill, when it comes I pay it from the already allocated bills account. It's also impossible to go over budget without noticing, you'd have to take the difference out of the savings account. If your budget is wrong you'll notice immediately. That's just my approach though, and it works for me. Other people may have different methods that work for them.

qwerty2020 9y ago

Interesting. Care to share the code behind the utility?

bdcravens 9y ago

I wrote a number of Selenium scripts for grabbing credit card details, etc, but Wells Fargo seems to have pretty good anti-Selenium protection built in - even when my traffic seemed indistinguishable from organic browsing, it wouldn't let me log in.

jklinger410 9y ago

I use Mint.

virmundi 9y ago
I do too. I find it odd that it took them so long to properly account for savings. They booked the transaction as a loss in my checking and a gain in my account, but flagged it as over spending.