4 ms·
I want to know where my money goes. I like to look at stacked-area (or column) charts of the categories of spending. To make this work I have some software I
by edoceo 3y ago
I want to know where my money goes. I like to look at stacked-area (or column) charts of the categories of spending. To make this work I have some software I made ~20 years ago that does double-entry book-keeping. At the end of the month, I import statements from financial service providers (eg: Wells Fargo, Chase, PayPal, Stripe, etc). Lots of stuff is repeat purchases (eg: Shell Gas) and my software automatically categorises. Some transactions I have to categorise manually. Each category / vendor becomes an expense-account and my banks and CCs exist as assets and liabilities.
Once the import and reconciliation is done I pull up a my column chart that shows where the money went -- and can compare over time -- see a full year of movement. I've been through various charting libraries with it and most recently moved to ECharts[0] -- so I'm planning to expand with Treemap and Sankey style visuals.
The import process, which I do monthly takes maybe an hour. I'm importing from like 5 bank accounts, 3 payment processors, 4 CC providers. The part that takes the longest is signing into their slow sites, navigating past pop-up/interstitial, getting to their download page and waiting for it to download. Loads of these sites (WF, Chase) have been "modernised" and have some real bullshit UI/UX going on -- lags, no keyboard, elements jump around, forms can't remember state, ctrl+click won't open in a new page cause that damned link isn't actually a link but some nested monster of DIVs with 19 event listeners on each one -- and somehow still all wrong.
I think the most-best feature would be to have some tool automatically get all my transactions from all these providers into one common format. Gimmee some JSON with like 10 commonly-named fields for the normal stuff and then 52 other BS fields that each provider likes to add (see a PayPal CSV for example). Does that exist and I just don't know?
[0] https://echarts.apache.org/ https://echarts.apache.org/
- bbkane 3y agoI don't know about a service that does this, but you might be able to script the website logins with https://playwright.dev/ https://playwright.dev/
- alchemist1e9 3y agoI’m in a similar boat and this comment has an interesting link. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37613525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37613525