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After trying to use GNU cash for some time, I got the feeling that a personal accounting app needs to be a web based service, to enable it to be used while on t
by billfruit 8y ago
After trying to use GNU cash for some time, I got the feeling that a personal accounting app needs to be a web based service, to enable it to be used while on the move/travelling, because I found myself building up a huge backlog of entries to be made in to the system in these situations. After about a month of use, I gave up, since the overhead of jotting down transactions and later entering into the system. I doubt GnuCash or any accounting system like that could possibly have integrated apis for pulling in transaction details from every bank, in every country of the world, atleast presently.
Now a days I use a smartphone app called walnut, which mines your SMSes for transaction data and builds up a ledger by itself, without the need for interfacing with banks directly, because in my country atleast all banks provide SMS trails for transactions.
- jessedhillon 8y agoI work for Plaid. You can sign up and get a dev token that has sufficient permission to access your own bank accounts. Then you can download your transactions and format them for GNU Ledger or whichever other format you prefer.
- billfruit 8y agoDoes it work for any bank in any country?
- jessedhillon 8y agoSorry, we only cover US and Canada right now.
- cup-of-tea 8y agoI've written a tool that can import data from my various bank accounts and credit cards. It's semi-automatic. Uses machine learning to guess the correct account but I can quickly change it. I then put the finishing touches on by hand.
- djhworld 8y agoI was thinking of using ML for this approach too but tbh most of my transactions are predictable, just a simple hashmap of Payee->Account works just as well. Cleaning up the payees is the trickier part. I guess in cases like Amazon, where you might buy a plethora of things across different accounts, ML might be helpful
- cup-of-tea 8y agoThe payees in my case are numerous enough that a dictionary would be too much to maintain. I don't actually clean up the payees, although I have thought about it. At the moment I leave the payee string so that if I use register on my bank account, for example, it looks exactly like my bank statement. I generally don't care what shop I bought groceries at. Those payee strings also sometimes contain interesting information like the location of the shop, so I wouldn't want to lose that.
- krupan 8y agoThis exists now: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.gnucash.android&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.gnucash.an...