4 ms·
It's so funny to see this post on HN. I recently took the plunge and got rid of Mint for Beancount. I probably spent 10 hours getting things set up. So far I
by qudat 5y ago
It's so funny to see this post on HN. I recently took the plunge and got rid of Mint for Beancount. I probably spent 10 hours getting things set up. So far I really like being in full control of the "database" via a composition of files. Even a database feels too heavy-handed for my personal accounts. It was a lot of fun to learn accounting terminology and methodologies like the double-entry accounting.
The most annoying part of the process is being required to download CSV files from each of my bank/cc/investment accounts.
I thought about building some APIs to be able to download this data automatically but some of my banks do not have publicly available APIs. That's hilarious to me because something like Mint or Plaid can get API access to my bank transactions but I, the owner the of the accounts, cannot.
Not only that, but you can only download CSVs for the last 2 years. Mint/Plaid can get the entire account history.
- Infernal 5y agoPlaid does not get API access to your bank account. Plaid logs into the same interface you do and scrapes the data. It’s why account import in things like Mint, YNAB etc are so flaky. EDIT: It seems Plaid has negotiated API access with some institutions at this point, but historically has primarily relied on screen scraping.
- boulos 5y agoIf you're based in the US, I would recommend ofxtools [1]. Anytime an institution supports "Download in Quicken", they have an OFX endpoint that you can find via ofxhome. [1] https://github.com/csingley/ofxtools https://github.com/csingley/ofxtools
- bogwog 5y agoI used this a couple of years ago to create a script that automatically imports transactions from my bank account into my beancount ledger. Unfortunately, only one of my banks provides OFX access at all (for a monthly fee), and I learned I’m not disciplined enough to keep up with the other banks manually. Its annoying because I’m pretty sure the other banks do have OFX services somewhere, they just dont provide it to all customers, plus paying a monthly fee for the one bank that does just feels exploitative. A less reliable, but more accessible solution might be to parse emailed bank statements, but those only go out once a month, whereas OFX can show new transactions within minutes/seconds.
- qudat 5y agoThe email solution is my plan. The banks/cc I use all have transaction alerts so I plan on parsing my maildir to automatically add transactions
- trepanne 5y agoThanks for the recommendation, always happy to see people getting use out of ofxtools. Unfortunately, it's far from true that all institutions supporting Quicken downloads can be found via ofxhome. That list was originally sourced from parsing MS Money API, and has been only sporadically updated in a manual case-by-case fashion. Also ofxhome is set to go away pretty soon. But we do what we can