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Without a way to easily import data directly from my banks/credit cards, using GnuCash (or Firefly III, a great alternative that's also worth checking out) just

by kayson 4y ago

Without a way to easily import data directly from my banks/credit cards, using GnuCash (or Firefly III, a great alternative that's also worth checking out) just takes way more time than its worth. (OFX was not as straightforward to obtain or use as one would hope). Mint is so much easier to use - it automatically pulls and categorizes transactions from pretty much any institution imaginable without no user effort needed. I stopped using Mint after a brief stint because of data privacy and security. No matter how many security claims they made, I just couldn't justify giving them my bank passwords in plain text. I suppose it doesn't matter as much for credit cards, but for my checking/savings accounts, a compromise would actually jeopardize my money. Apparently some of the big US banks are starting to roll out authentication APIs (e.g OAUTH) so it may be worth another look. It does seem like there's still room for a FOSS/selfhosted Mint clone that gracefully and automatically handles data import (I wouldn't even mind having to enter my banking passwords each time I want to update, to avoid storing them)

kodah 4y ago
A Mint clone would require that banks facilitate much more open access. Being centralized is a good position for Mint because all the financial institution has to do is trust Intuit.
BeetleB 4y ago
I use KMyMoney which has probably the same "support" as GnuCash for online banking. I now just download transacations from the institution (CSV, OFX, etc) and import the file. Many institutions charge extra for being able to pull automatically, but their export is free. Sounds like a pain but it isn't that bad.
- brewdad 4y ago
  I've found that I appreciate the manual download and import process. It makes me look over each transaction more deliberately than I would if it were just an automated update. I've caught 3 or 4 fraudulent or erroneous charges over the past half decade because I'm forced to look at each charge on my credit cards. Probably 90-95% of my spending goes on a credit card and then gets paid off at the end of the month. GnuCash has been great for tracking everything. I'll have to look at KMyMoney too.
  - BeetleB 4y ago
    I didn't mean to imply KMyMoney is necessarily better. I switched a decade ago as it had a better interface - but I don't even remember what aspect was better. I think it did a better job with autocompleting entries or something.
chrsig 4y ago
I hated all of the advertising in mint. I recently started using ynab[0], which can also import balances & transactions from banks. It supports oauth and 2fa, which was nice for the reason you listed: I don't want to give my credentials to anyone, even a "trusted" vendor like intuit. It also has a rest api, which I haven't gotten to try yet, but stands out as a very nice to have feature for me. The downside is that ynab is some $, but I think it's worth it not to have ads for insurance, loans, or credit cards being shoved down my throat. I evaluated personal capital[1] as well, but I got really turned off by them having a "continue with google" auth workflow that leads you to a page saying they haven't implemented it yet. Not a great way to build trust, which is a absolute must for any financial application. If any HNers have good recommendations, I for one would appreciate hearing them. I'm ok spending ~100/yr on a good financial management app. [0] https://youneedabudget.com https://youneedabudget.com [1] https://www.personalcapital.com/ https://www.personalcapital.com/
- kayson 4y ago
  The thing that turned me away from ynab is that their marketing seems to say that they're trying to change spending/saving behavior in some way. I don't need to plan or make a zbb, I just want to easily categorize and track my spending. Admittedly, I didn't even try their free trial, but it just didn't seem like a good fit.
  - sentientslug 4y ago
    Yeah YNAB is pretty much full steam ahead with the ZBB mindset. I've tried to use it without doing the ZBB part and it really is not set up for that.
  - chrsig 4y ago
    Yeah, I can understand if you're not looking for something to help you with a zero balance budget, then it wouldn't be a great fit. I think my biggest gripe is the reporting tools. They give a couple basic charts, but it leaves a lot to be desired.
- hirvi74 4y ago
  I recently ended my subscription for YNAB after more than half a decade of usage. I was grandfathered into the old price, but they took that away with the most recent price increase, so I could not justify staying. However, since I have quit, I have not found my habits to have changed. I think some part of the system is permanently burned into my brain. I am exploring my options with hledger, and it's been a neat experience so far.
LAC-Tech 4y ago
"Without a way to easily import data directly from my banks/credit cards" What is this wizardry? I go to the web portal of my (banks) and basically do double entry.
- atmosx 4y ago
  US banks support access via API and apps use to fetch data. European banks usually don’t do that, for security reasons.
  - shellfishgene 4y ago
    I think all German banks at least support getting transaction data via am API.
  - amaccuish 4y ago
    Umm, in the EU due to PSD2, all banks must provide a standardised API: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_banking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_banking
    - Plasmoid 4y ago
      Sort of. IIRC, (either the EU as a whole or just the UK) basically killed open banking. To even use the standard you were required to be an accredited broker even if the data was kept local to the user's device. Getting accredited cost a fortune and basically made it impossible for anyone but the Intuits of Europe to use it.
      - p_l 4y ago
        I think most "normal" accounts in Poland have CSV report options, and some have standardised MT940. "Enterprise" accounts are pretty much dead in the water without some APIs for over a decade now, as far as I know - the big clients want their SAP and whatnot to directly integrate.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
apatters 4y ago
Can't stress enough how valuable this is for small business. Auto-importing and auto-classifying transactions from financial institutions completely changes the way that bookkeeping functions. It also gives you real-time understanding of your financial situation and lowers cost/time. Our accounting software auto-imports all of our transactions daily via the Plaid API and our classifying ruleset categorizes 95% of them automatically. All that's left for our bookkeeper is to spend a few hours a month going over the unusual ones and doing some general accuracy/sanity checks. In addition we get dynamically generated reports every week which are ~90% accurate. Prior to these features the model was "bookkeeper manually imports a bunch of transactions from multiple sources and does a ton of work at the end of each month and produces one monthly report." Automation here has been a huge win, lower costs and better results. As much as I appreciate and prefer FOSS software I would never go back to the old way of doing things, the last thing a founder wants to spend a lot of time or money on is bookkeeping.
- kkfx 4y ago
  Personally I hope a day enough people join to push a law that impose banks to have a standard open API (like SEPA OpenBank, witch is mandatory here in EU BUT only open to institutions not private citizens) open to any customer NOT ONLY as read-only but also for disposing transactions to avoid the need of crappy web-banking porcals. Unfortunately too many use computers every days without even understanding how can they work for their user profit instead of some third parties mostly employing the human customer as a data cow and small-microfinance bank...
  - apatters 4y ago
    If we legally mandate this what will the consequence be for small businesses that can't afford the cost to comply? (Even if you mandate it for only the big players - what if there end up being only three players who can afford it, they do it well, no one else does and you end up with only three banks?) I'm super supportive of banks opening up their data for the reasons in my prior post. But the second order effects of regulation are often overlooked--this is exactly what has gone wrong in the US financial industry where we used to have thousands of credit unions across the country and since 2008 most of them have been driven out of business by compliance costs. Naturally the handful of banks that remain are the ones that were the biggest and had the best lobbying effort in Washington...
yonrg 4y ago
Gnucash supports importing transactions from my bank account via aqbanking. It uses FinTS/HBCI afaik. And I am surprised and very happy that this still works after PSD2. A manual import, copy& pasting every single transaction would increase the effort intensely. I use gnucash for about half a decade now for private financing and it is absolutely a valuable helper. I run it at most once a week: Fetch transactions, query balance and reconcile.
Fnoord 4y ago
Firefly III uses plugins to import the data. Any9ne can write one, in theory.
Diris 4y ago
You can easily import data into Firefly III using their data importer[0] and Nordigen API or Spectre (usage is explained in [0]). Doing so automatically is just a matter of running a cron job [0] https://docs.firefly-iii.org/data-importer/ https://docs.firefly-iii.org/data-importer/
LoveMortuus 4y ago
I've heard many good things about Mint, but my problem with it is that it's US only... Or at least I from EU am unable to use it...
ParetoOptimal 4y ago
> Without a way to easily import data directly from my banks/credit cards, using GnuCash (or Firefly III, a great alternative that's also worth checking out) just takes way more time than its worth. (OFX was not as straightforward to obtain or use as one would hope) In the past I used the plaid api to get transaction data.
iimblack 4y ago
Mint had a data breach and got my bank account hacked which was the first strike. They’re also owned by intuit.

by kayson 4y ago

kodah 4y ago

A Mint clone would require that banks facilitate much more open access. Being centralized is a good position for Mint because all the financial institution has to do is trust Intuit.

BeetleB 4y ago

I use KMyMoney which has probably the same "support" as GnuCash for online banking. I now just download transacations from the institution (CSV, OFX, etc) and import the file. Many institutions charge extra for being able to pull automatically, but their export is free. Sounds like a pain but it isn't that bad.

brewdad 4y ago
I've found that I appreciate the manual download and import process. It makes me look over each transaction more deliberately than I would if it were just an automated update. I've caught 3 or 4 fraudulent or erroneous charges over the past half decade because I'm forced to look at each charge on my credit cards. Probably 90-95% of my spending goes on a credit card and then gets paid off at the end of the month. GnuCash has been great for tracking everything. I'll have to look at KMyMoney too.
- BeetleB 4y ago
  I didn't mean to imply KMyMoney is necessarily better. I switched a decade ago as it had a better interface - but I don't even remember what aspect was better. I think it did a better job with autocompleting entries or something.

chrsig 4y ago

I hated all of the advertising in mint. I recently started using ynab[0], which can also import balances & transactions from banks. It supports oauth and 2fa, which was nice for the reason you listed: I don't want to give my credentials to anyone, even a "trusted" vendor like intuit. It also has a rest api, which I haven't gotten to try yet, but stands out as a very nice to have feature for me. The downside is that ynab is some $, but I think it's worth it not to have ads for insurance, loans, or credit cards being shoved down my throat. I evaluated personal capital[1] as well, but I got really turned off by them having a "continue with google" auth workflow that leads you to a page saying they haven't implemented it yet. Not a great way to build trust, which is a absolute must for any financial application. If any HNers have good recommendations, I for one would appreciate hearing them. I'm ok spending ~100/yr on a good financial management app. [0] https://youneedabudget.com https://youneedabudget.com [1] https://www.personalcapital.com/ https://www.personalcapital.com/

kayson 4y ago
The thing that turned me away from ynab is that their marketing seems to say that they're trying to change spending/saving behavior in some way. I don't need to plan or make a zbb, I just want to easily categorize and track my spending. Admittedly, I didn't even try their free trial, but it just didn't seem like a good fit.
- sentientslug 4y ago
  Yeah YNAB is pretty much full steam ahead with the ZBB mindset. I've tried to use it without doing the ZBB part and it really is not set up for that.
- chrsig 4y ago
  Yeah, I can understand if you're not looking for something to help you with a zero balance budget, then it wouldn't be a great fit. I think my biggest gripe is the reporting tools. They give a couple basic charts, but it leaves a lot to be desired.
hirvi74 4y ago
I recently ended my subscription for YNAB after more than half a decade of usage. I was grandfathered into the old price, but they took that away with the most recent price increase, so I could not justify staying. However, since I have quit, I have not found my habits to have changed. I think some part of the system is permanently burned into my brain. I am exploring my options with hledger, and it's been a neat experience so far.

LAC-Tech 4y ago

"Without a way to easily import data directly from my banks/credit cards" What is this wizardry? I go to the web portal of my (banks) and basically do double entry.

atmosx 4y ago
US banks support access via API and apps use to fetch data. European banks usually don’t do that, for security reasons.
- shellfishgene 4y ago
  I think all German banks at least support getting transaction data via am API.
- amaccuish 4y ago
  Umm, in the EU due to PSD2, all banks must provide a standardised API: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_banking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_banking
  - Plasmoid 4y ago
    Sort of. IIRC, (either the EU as a whole or just the UK) basically killed open banking. To even use the standard you were required to be an accredited broker even if the data was kept local to the user's device. Getting accredited cost a fortune and basically made it impossible for anyone but the Intuits of Europe to use it.
    - p_l 4y ago
      I think most "normal" accounts in Poland have CSV report options, and some have standardised MT940. "Enterprise" accounts are pretty much dead in the water without some APIs for over a decade now, as far as I know - the big clients want their SAP and whatnot to directly integrate.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

apatters 4y ago

Can't stress enough how valuable this is for small business. Auto-importing and auto-classifying transactions from financial institutions completely changes the way that bookkeeping functions. It also gives you real-time understanding of your financial situation and lowers cost/time. Our accounting software auto-imports all of our transactions daily via the Plaid API and our classifying ruleset categorizes 95% of them automatically. All that's left for our bookkeeper is to spend a few hours a month going over the unusual ones and doing some general accuracy/sanity checks. In addition we get dynamically generated reports every week which are ~90% accurate. Prior to these features the model was "bookkeeper manually imports a bunch of transactions from multiple sources and does a ton of work at the end of each month and produces one monthly report." Automation here has been a huge win, lower costs and better results. As much as I appreciate and prefer FOSS software I would never go back to the old way of doing things, the last thing a founder wants to spend a lot of time or money on is bookkeeping.

kkfx 4y ago
Personally I hope a day enough people join to push a law that impose banks to have a standard open API (like SEPA OpenBank, witch is mandatory here in EU BUT only open to institutions not private citizens) open to any customer NOT ONLY as read-only but also for disposing transactions to avoid the need of crappy web-banking porcals. Unfortunately too many use computers every days without even understanding how can they work for their user profit instead of some third parties mostly employing the human customer as a data cow and small-microfinance bank...
- apatters 4y ago
  If we legally mandate this what will the consequence be for small businesses that can't afford the cost to comply? (Even if you mandate it for only the big players - what if there end up being only three players who can afford it, they do it well, no one else does and you end up with only three banks?) I'm super supportive of banks opening up their data for the reasons in my prior post. But the second order effects of regulation are often overlooked--this is exactly what has gone wrong in the US financial industry where we used to have thousands of credit unions across the country and since 2008 most of them have been driven out of business by compliance costs. Naturally the handful of banks that remain are the ones that were the biggest and had the best lobbying effort in Washington...

yonrg 4y ago

Gnucash supports importing transactions from my bank account via aqbanking. It uses FinTS/HBCI afaik. And I am surprised and very happy that this still works after PSD2. A manual import, copy& pasting every single transaction would increase the effort intensely. I use gnucash for about half a decade now for private financing and it is absolutely a valuable helper. I run it at most once a week: Fetch transactions, query balance and reconcile.

Fnoord 4y ago

Firefly III uses plugins to import the data. Any9ne can write one, in theory.

Diris 4y ago

You can easily import data into Firefly III using their data importer[0] and Nordigen API or Spectre (usage is explained in [0]). Doing so automatically is just a matter of running a cron job [0] https://docs.firefly-iii.org/data-importer/ https://docs.firefly-iii.org/data-importer/

LoveMortuus 4y ago

I've heard many good things about Mint, but my problem with it is that it's US only... Or at least I from EU am unable to use it...

ParetoOptimal 4y ago

> Without a way to easily import data directly from my banks/credit cards, using GnuCash (or Firefly III, a great alternative that's also worth checking out) just takes way more time than its worth. (OFX was not as straightforward to obtain or use as one would hope) In the past I used the plaid api to get transaction data.

iimblack 4y ago

Mint had a data breach and got my bank account hacked which was the first strike. They’re also owned by intuit.