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Show HN: Connect your bank account to Google Sheets
- robertsbernans 5y agoHey everyone, I made this tool as a hobby project, I would love to hear your thoughts. The tool allows connecting personal and business accounts from over 1,000 banks in Europe. It uses Nordigen’s free open banking API. For full disclosure, I am one of the founders of Nordigen.
- kjaftaedi 5y agoThe Nordigen website says 31 countries, but does not list them anywhere. Is this information, or a list of banks available anywhere? I'd rather know if this might work for me before spending time on it.
- occupant 5y agoSeems to be listed here: https://airtable.com/shrX4uBtNLnsPxSih/tblyRj2FTQoXq9Qmu https://airtable.com/shrX4uBtNLnsPxSih/tblyRj2FTQoXq9Qmu Only EEA countries I guess. Is anyone aware of something similar for US banks?
- haliskerbas 5y agoYou can kind of hack together something like this with Plaid
- kjaftaedi 5y agoThanks for the link! Seems like 1,000 banks is a bit of an exaggeration.. if you remove the duplicates, I don't think there's even 100.
- robertsbernans 5y agoNo, that's not exaggerated. It's very common in many European countries to have strong regional banks. There are over 6,000 banks in Europe.
- kjaftaedi 5y agoYes, I have many strong regional banks in my country.. none of them appear to be supported. You claim: >The tool allows connecting personal and business accounts from over 1,000 banks in Europe Please provide a list of the 1,000+ banks you support.
- cookie_monsta 5y agoSo this tool helps me share my transaction history with something called Nordigen and... Google? Is this a joke?
- hh3k0 5y agoYeah, that gives me the heebie-jeebies.
- rawtxapp 5y agoWait until you hear about this company called Plaid (valued at ~13B$) which is used by a lot of FinTech companies to access your bank account. They take your username/password in cleartext and go ahead and scrape and do as they please with the data to prevent fraud (oh and if 2fa blocks them from scraping, they'll ask you to disable it). How is this even remotely acceptable blows my mind. My alternatives to transfer money into these fintech companies are checks (are we in the 90s?) or wire transfer (20$ each).
- cookie_monsta 5y agoI am obviously just such a low roller that I can't even imagine downloading a spreadsheet of recent transactions from my bank's website being a genuine pain point.
- Lev1a 5y agoMy bank makes me download or at least electronically acknowledge (through a button in the online banking) the bank statements it generates every few weeks. If those go unchecked for too long they're sent to me in the post, charging me for it.
- cookie_monsta 5y agoAs ridiculous as that seems I am completely unsurprised that your bank extracts near-random charges while playing with your money. I can't see how tools like this solve that problem, though...
- paxys 5y agoIn case people are unaware Excel supports this natively – https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/06/15/introducing-money-excel-easier-manage-finances/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/06/1...
- sahaskatta 5y agoExcel uses Plaid for bank integrations.
- throwawayswede 5y agohaha, sure, because google needs more of your data, and whatever this nordigen thing is... laughable from this nordigen's information handling section in TOS > 2.3. As the Services also allow User to upload Information and/or obtain Account Information and personal data therein, User further acknowledges and agrees that by uploading or entering any Information for the Services and by using the Services, User grants Nordigen permission to make anonymized data based on personal and non-personal data collected from User or through User's use of the Services, and combine such anonymized data with that of other Users in order to make anonymized aggregate data. Nordigen may use the anonymized data and anonymized aggregate data for various business purposes and legitimate interests of Nordigen, including but not limited to improving the Services, developing and improving other Nordigen products and services, and distributing or licensing such data to third parties with whom Nordigen has a business relationship. Every time the word "anonymized" is mentioned here you have to understand that everything in software is at risk of bugs or mistakes. But even if, they'll definitely sell your data.
- akomtu 5y agoSuch ToS always have a clause like "we can change these terms at any time". I'm surprised that these data miners bother to declare their intent at all.
- robertsbernans 5y agoNo, we don't sell your data neither in raw nor anonymised form (if that is the case). We take privacy very seriously.
- throwawayswede 5y agoPlease forgive me if I don't take your word for it when TOS allows it. > including but not limited to improving the Services, developing and improving other Nordigen products and services, and distributing or licensing such data to third parties with whom Nordigen has a business relationship. That means if you don't now, you might do it in the future. If if you don't, you might sell the whole thing to another company who will do this.
- kureikain 5y agoI have been toying with this idea and my solution is to use email. Everytime I made purchase my bank (BankOfAmerica) send me an email, I parse that email and write data to a google sheet. It's great because I don't need to give credential to service like Plaid. I used webhook of service like https://hanami.run https://hanami.run and configure my bank to send email notification to name@domain.com (my own domain). Hook it up with hanami.run webhook (or any email to webhook service) and voila, now you can parse the email body and do whatever you want with it, in real time. Bank sends email pretty quick.
- denimnerd42 5y agoI'm interested, had the same line of thought, and a bofa customer too. Mind pushing anything you have to github or similar?
- kureikain 5y agoYes, going to clean it my code(bunch of hard code and manual stuff) a bit and share it. Always want to do it.
- arthurcolle 5y agoWhere is this setting? I just created a BofA account a few days ago because BBVA is a hellhole of despair (Simple acquisition victim) so this sounds much better.
- bobsomers 5y agoI don't recall where it is on BofA's website, but most banks have some feature along the lines of "send me an email when a transaction over X amount happens". I just set that value to $0 or $0.01 so I get emails for every transaction made.
- arthurcolle 5y agoGotcha, I'll poke around, thanks! What do you use for inbound mail processing? Do you run your own mail server? I was looking to process TheOCC.com inbound emails for some options trading stuff I was doing but never decided on a solution.
- GormanFletcher 5y agoAnother option in this space is Tiller (https://www.tillerhq.com/ https://www.tillerhq.com/). They seem well-established, and offer some spreadsheet templates for plug-and-play solutions to some common budgeting scenarios. If you don't care about spreadsheets specifically -- if you're just looking for scriptable access to your financials -- Lunch Money (https://lunchmoney.app https://lunchmoney.app) has a public API. They'll also be opening the beta of rollover budgeting any day now, which has me excited!
- benatkin 5y agoI got it mixed up with Teller https://teller.io/ https://teller.io/ , which is an alternative to Plaid, and whose CEO was rooting for Miami and lambasting SF (I like both), along with posting other controversial opinions https://twitter.com/bitandbang/status/1346181103531552769 https://twitter.com/bitandbang/status/1346181103531552769 Hmm, this tweet lists some other Plaid alternatives - Yodlee, which I heard of but forgot about, and Quovo, which I don't remember hearing of https://twitter.com/knitesh/status/1292605236805169152 https://twitter.com/knitesh/status/1292605236805169152
- coreyja 5y agoQuovo has been bought by plaid since this tweet, just FYI https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/08/fintech-start-up-plaid-to-buy-competitor-quovo-for-200-million-in-its-first-major-deal.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/08/fintech-start-up-plaid-to-bu...
- thedougd 5y agoTiller uses Yodlee, so it has comprehensive bank support.
- jonathantf2 5y agoMy bank account has this feature built in and it's really helpful.
- Blahah 5y agoGood interoperable APIs for banks, and ways for people to be able to access and use their own data: +10000 better future points Connecting my bank account to google sheets: -1000000 I do see the intention and the utility - people should be able to easily access and make sense of their data from whatever source and in whatever form. That you are enabling that and showcasing examples is admirable. Google services in particular are so deeply exposed across people's devices and accounts, past and present, that they have for a long time been one of the largest attack surfaces: - for incidental or targeted fraud from a distance - for intrusion by personal contacts: stalking, coercive control - for relinquishing control of personal data unintentionally: to an employer, to a state, or to arbitrary contacts by oversight because it's incredibly hard to track the myriad dimensions of sharing permissions In general I applaud what you're doing. I would love to see an example of how to have insight into and oversight of your banking data on your own machine, with a focus on privacy - that's missing from the ecosystem I think.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- robertsbernans 5y agoThis project was just to showcase functionality of Nordigen APIs. The foundation of this are APIs for banks which you can use in any way you see fit and is completely independent from services like Google Sheets.
- neilv 5y agoIf you want to import banking data for tracking your personal finances or small business, there's also GnuCash, which you can run locally. https://gnucash.org/ https://gnucash.org/ I haven't used its online data-fetching features, but instead save manually save OFX and QFX files periodically from banking Web sites, and later import them into GnuCash (which includes transaction matchup features). I also use the statement reconciliation features. I save all the OFX, QFX, and PDF files separately, in case I ever want to do something different with the data. (One of my financial services won't let you download transaction data older than 90 days, and most of my services won't let you download data or statements more than 1-2 years old.)
- sumedh 5y agoIs there something similar to gnucash but with better UX?
- neilv 5y agoIf you're up to investing time in GnuCash, and tuning it to your needs, there's some nice UI/HCI details, though some is still rough. But the GnuCash out-of-box UX definitely isn't contemporary tech industry polish nor style. (Though that heritage also means that GnuCash isn't selling out the user a dozen different ways like we tend to do in tech industry right now.) (Examples of tuning GnuCash: I replaced the default account hierarchy with one I evolved, switched to displaying only leaf account names instead of the colon path ones, and color-coded the accounts to distinguish liquid/non-liquid/liabilities/receivables.)
- devinsit 5y agoI built uFincs (https://ufincs.com https://ufincs.com) basically because I got fed up with GnuCash's UX. It only supports importing CSVs right now, but I'm open to adding other formats. It's also a web app rather than a desktop app, but you're free try it out/use it without an account (https://ufincs.com/noaccount https://ufincs.com/noaccount) and all of your data will just be kept in your browser.
- 5y ago
- TuringNYC 5y agoOn this topic, I tried to do a Jan 1st to Dec 31st transaction dump from Chase Bank into a CSV and the whole thing failed -- "too many records." Then I broke it up to half year segments and the second half failed, again "too many records." Finally broke it up to three 4-month segments and realized Chase has a -- clearly arbitrary -- limit of 2500 txns (IIRC) per CSV dump. I understand the need for limits, but 2500 rows x 7 columns?! This isn't exactly "Big Data." Thank you for sharing these tools.
- mcs5280 5y agoGoogle and my bank account. That's gonna be a no from me, dawg.
- deregulateMed 5y agoGiven how bad customer support is, I find it laughable that you think Google cares about you. Google already knows if you are a 10%er or 90%er, your ads wouldn't change.
- klyrs 5y agoThe gulf between "google the company is willing to provide customer service to you" and "a google dev will scrape your data and attempt to monetize it" is extraordinarily vast. Ever moreso that this thread exists and we've got somebody showing off how easy it is to link your bank account...
- deregulateMed 5y agoThat's what my second sentence says.
- dylan604 5y agoThat was my immediate reaction as well. Then I though about it some more, and got to hell nah.
- zahrc 5y agoCool idea, awesome tool, maybe helpful for some, but hearing google and some third party in context of my bank account makes me want to wrap up in tin foil.
- andag 5y agoFeedback : my time from registering to getting data from my account was insanely fast. Super easy to get started . I strongly agree on putting a list of supported banks before signing up though. I've had experiences with other providers where sign up and verification takes time, and then after spending 24h being verified it doesn't support your bank anyway... So that up front is good
- mikewarot 5y agoMy banking info is the only thing Google/Chrome/etc. will never be trusted with.
- pleb_nz 5y agoWow. Scary. Not something I would ever want to do. Especially with a company like Google.
- emilfihlman 5y agoIf it can be stored in Google services it can be stored in your own db, too.
- throwawayswede 5y agoI can't reply on @robertsbernans's comment for some reason, but his previous comment definitely did not mention that he's a cofounder of this Nordigen, so he deleted it and made a new one to make it seem "transparent" only after being called out, which makes this whole thing even shadier.
- jesterson 5y agoWow, I thought this is just an upsell to his API but things seem to be more complicated
- robertsbernans 5y agoIDK why you cannot tag me in the comments, but there was only one comment in the first place mentioning me being the co-founder. You can check when was the post posted and my comment. Sorry you got that impression.
- throwawayswede 5y agoI didn't "get that impression". You made sure people got that impression by first not mentioning it in your "hi i made this toy" comment, then you deleted it, then you made a new one without acknowledging being called out.
- foxes 5y agoNo.
- beebeepka 5y agoNext up:plumb your bloodstream directly to google
- Carthi 5y agoSuper handy!