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This looks awesome. I love that it's built on ledger. I have been wanting to move away from Simplifi Money for some time for obvious reasons (owned by Intuit).

This looks awesome. I love that it's built on ledger. I have been wanting to move away from Simplifi Money for some time for obvious reasons (owned by Intuit). It seems that the real moat is pulling the data in a consistent and correct way. Yes, you COULD try to find every single export option for every bank, but I think Plaid is really the only service that pulls this data somewhat correctly, due to the U.S. not having a PSD2 equivalent in our laws. So the question is, would it make sense to have a Plaid plugin for this? Obviously because they are a 3rd party, it negates some of the benefits, but I simply cannot use this system manually because I have so many accounts. Maybe one workaround is to pull from Tiller (which uses plaid), then export a csv/excel. Any chance there's a good plan in place to get automated data imports working, even if we need a 3rd party to do it?

itissid 3y ago
Mint already uses Plaid, but I the transaction information it gets is too low in information to categorize anything reasonably. For example my Amazon Grocery transaction happen on my amazon Chase Credit card(gives me 5% discount). But connecting to Chase.com using plaid pulls in transaction statement is still information poor. The obvious consequence of this is that budget information is not correctly reflected in Mint(that info is actually in my Amazon.com silo). The only way to fix this rn is sadly manually. As a tangent, I do feel though that LLM agents that can one day act on individuals behalf, reading info and making this manual job far more easier in absence of any govt regulations.
- ydant 3y ago
  Fighting with Mint and categorizing Amazon purchases was what initially pushed me down the path into plain text accounting (PTA). I ended up long down the rabbit hole with auto-downloading Amazon orders (originally with https://github.com/jbms/finance-dl https://github.com/jbms/finance-dl, but then my own custom scraping) and importing and matching them up with credit card transactions using beancount-import (https://github.com/jbms/beancount-import https://github.com/jbms/beancount-import). This ultimately resulted in me spending a lot less on Amazon - to the point that now doing it manually wouldn't be too bad...
- avarun 3y ago
  Mint does not use Plaid. Intuit has their own service for integrating with bank APIs and/or screen-scraping that they use across all their products.
  - marwis 3y ago
    They used plaid as a fallback for some banks
- parkerhiggins 3y ago
  Copilot Money achieve Amazon SKU description automatically by AuthN into your Amazon account and transaction matching. They do this lack of info lift and then recommend category splits.
ananthakumaran 3y ago
I can try to improve import functionality, but Plaid etc is quite hard. I can't even figure out their pricing model from their page. So, as a free app I don't think it can support Plaid.
- jpeeler 3y ago
  You just need to have each person create their own Plaid account (which is probably the way you want it anyway). The free tier supports 100 institutions. Last time I looked at this, I thought it was stated that the free/sandbox tier is not guaranteed to have the same SLA as the production environment. But I can't find this in the documentation anywhere.
  - phoenixy1 3y ago
    [I work at Plaid] I don't know if we explicitly write down in the docs that the free Development tier isn't guaranteed to have the same SLA as the production environment, but if you're not paying Plaid there is no SLA (I mean, the usual recourse for an SLA breach is a rebate, but you can't give a rebate to someone who isn't paying you in the first place). That said, in practice the differences between the free and paid tiers for a personal finance app are not really such that someone doing a hobbyist app for personal use would notice them.
    - debaserab2 3y ago
      Correct me if I'm wrong but some of the banks don't work in developer mode at all (at least, it doesn't seem to work with Chase).
      - phoenixy1 3y ago
        All banks work in the free Development environment, but for banks on OAuth, including Chase, you need to go through the Production approval vetting as a pre-requisite. Once you've been approved for Production (and if applicable for the given bank, gotten your security questionnaire approved as well -- I think Chase requires this) you can then access those banks in Development for free.
malermeister 3y ago
I know this is only vaguely related, but as a European that's been looking for an open source budgeting solution, how does PSD2 help?
- robcohen 3y ago
  My understanding of PSD2 is that it requires banking transactions to be "machine-readable" whatever that means. So there's an actual legal requirement for making data accessible outside of the browser.
  - ghosty141 3y ago
    The problem I faced when I looked at data export was that none of the banks had any apis. You always had to go through 3rd party commercial apis. Maybe there are ways bur I didnt find them
    - jtha 3y ago
      If you're talking about European banks they all have APIs. But only licensed companies can use them directly. Those companies are called AISPs within the PSD2 framework, sometimes referred to as aggregators. Some of them have ways for individuals to access their own accounts at banks via the AISP APIs. But there are limitations, one major one being that PSD2 doesn't cover credit card data or anything other than deposit accounts. [I'm a product manager at a bank]
- dylmye 3y ago
  you should check out Actual budget as well - works perfectly for me in the same situation.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
hackernewds 3y ago
What is PSD2 and why is it important? Is it the basis for something like UPI in India?
- sailorganymede 3y ago
  Payment Services Directive 2 and it’s basically legal stuff we gotta comply with to do payments. Can’t speak for India but it’s v much something in the UK
- kkfx 3y ago
  It basically means OpenBank API mandatory just to financial companies, not to consumer, potentially any enterprise can ask to have OpenBank API access if it meet certain criteria and then it can get and commit any transaction from all EU banks. So potentially offer to their customers full API access to their EU banks, for anything, disposing transactions as well locally instead of via some crappy website. This also means having legally valid local transactions (XML/XADES or JSON/JADES signed by the bank).
avirut 3y ago
One option I'd recommend for anyone working towards this is to use the SimpleFIN Bridge [0], which is basically an API wrapper around MX (a Plaid competitor) designed for personal use by the same people that make Budgeting with Buckets. Data security is definitely an issue, but I value having my transactions automatically imported more than I'm concerned about the risk of SimpleFIN being breached. I've personally used SimpleFIN to provide automatic imports in my own personal, kind-of selfhostable personal finance tool [1]. [0] https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/ https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/ [1] https://github.com/avirut/bursar https://github.com/avirut/bursar
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- robcohen 3y ago
  Wow, very cool thank you for sharing!
dingdong33 3y ago
Reason are not obvious to me. Could you elaborate?

itissid 3y ago

Mint already uses Plaid, but I the transaction information it gets is too low in information to categorize anything reasonably. For example my Amazon Grocery transaction happen on my amazon Chase Credit card(gives me 5% discount). But connecting to Chase.com using plaid pulls in transaction statement is still information poor. The obvious consequence of this is that budget information is not correctly reflected in Mint(that info is actually in my Amazon.com silo). The only way to fix this rn is sadly manually. As a tangent, I do feel though that LLM agents that can one day act on individuals behalf, reading info and making this manual job far more easier in absence of any govt regulations.

ydant 3y ago
Fighting with Mint and categorizing Amazon purchases was what initially pushed me down the path into plain text accounting (PTA). I ended up long down the rabbit hole with auto-downloading Amazon orders (originally with https://github.com/jbms/finance-dl https://github.com/jbms/finance-dl, but then my own custom scraping) and importing and matching them up with credit card transactions using beancount-import (https://github.com/jbms/beancount-import https://github.com/jbms/beancount-import). This ultimately resulted in me spending a lot less on Amazon - to the point that now doing it manually wouldn't be too bad...
avarun 3y ago
Mint does not use Plaid. Intuit has their own service for integrating with bank APIs and/or screen-scraping that they use across all their products.
- marwis 3y ago
  They used plaid as a fallback for some banks
parkerhiggins 3y ago
Copilot Money achieve Amazon SKU description automatically by AuthN into your Amazon account and transaction matching. They do this lack of info lift and then recommend category splits.

ananthakumaran 3y ago

I can try to improve import functionality, but Plaid etc is quite hard. I can't even figure out their pricing model from their page. So, as a free app I don't think it can support Plaid.

jpeeler 3y ago
You just need to have each person create their own Plaid account (which is probably the way you want it anyway). The free tier supports 100 institutions. Last time I looked at this, I thought it was stated that the free/sandbox tier is not guaranteed to have the same SLA as the production environment. But I can't find this in the documentation anywhere.
- phoenixy1 3y ago
  [I work at Plaid] I don't know if we explicitly write down in the docs that the free Development tier isn't guaranteed to have the same SLA as the production environment, but if you're not paying Plaid there is no SLA (I mean, the usual recourse for an SLA breach is a rebate, but you can't give a rebate to someone who isn't paying you in the first place). That said, in practice the differences between the free and paid tiers for a personal finance app are not really such that someone doing a hobbyist app for personal use would notice them.
  - debaserab2 3y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong but some of the banks don't work in developer mode at all (at least, it doesn't seem to work with Chase).
    - phoenixy1 3y ago
      All banks work in the free Development environment, but for banks on OAuth, including Chase, you need to go through the Production approval vetting as a pre-requisite. Once you've been approved for Production (and if applicable for the given bank, gotten your security questionnaire approved as well -- I think Chase requires this) you can then access those banks in Development for free.

malermeister 3y ago

I know this is only vaguely related, but as a European that's been looking for an open source budgeting solution, how does PSD2 help?

robcohen 3y ago
My understanding of PSD2 is that it requires banking transactions to be "machine-readable" whatever that means. So there's an actual legal requirement for making data accessible outside of the browser.
- ghosty141 3y ago
  The problem I faced when I looked at data export was that none of the banks had any apis. You always had to go through 3rd party commercial apis. Maybe there are ways bur I didnt find them
  - jtha 3y ago
    If you're talking about European banks they all have APIs. But only licensed companies can use them directly. Those companies are called AISPs within the PSD2 framework, sometimes referred to as aggregators. Some of them have ways for individuals to access their own accounts at banks via the AISP APIs. But there are limitations, one major one being that PSD2 doesn't cover credit card data or anything other than deposit accounts. [I'm a product manager at a bank]
dylmye 3y ago
you should check out Actual budget as well - works perfectly for me in the same situation.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

hackernewds 3y ago

What is PSD2 and why is it important? Is it the basis for something like UPI in India?

sailorganymede 3y ago
Payment Services Directive 2 and it’s basically legal stuff we gotta comply with to do payments. Can’t speak for India but it’s v much something in the UK
kkfx 3y ago
It basically means OpenBank API mandatory just to financial companies, not to consumer, potentially any enterprise can ask to have OpenBank API access if it meet certain criteria and then it can get and commit any transaction from all EU banks. So potentially offer to their customers full API access to their EU banks, for anything, disposing transactions as well locally instead of via some crappy website. This also means having legally valid local transactions (XML/XADES or JSON/JADES signed by the bank).

avirut 3y ago

One option I'd recommend for anyone working towards this is to use the SimpleFIN Bridge [0], which is basically an API wrapper around MX (a Plaid competitor) designed for personal use by the same people that make Budgeting with Buckets. Data security is definitely an issue, but I value having my transactions automatically imported more than I'm concerned about the risk of SimpleFIN being breached. I've personally used SimpleFIN to provide automatic imports in my own personal, kind-of selfhostable personal finance tool [1]. [0] https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/ https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/ [1] https://github.com/avirut/bursar https://github.com/avirut/bursar

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
robcohen 3y ago
Wow, very cool thank you for sharing!

dingdong33 3y ago

Reason are not obvious to me. Could you elaborate?