7 ms·

First question from reading through the landing page is about this part: > Import your statements from your broker or bank. Exactly what brokers/banks that ar

by diggan 2y ago

First question from reading through the landing page is about this part: > Import your statements from your broker or bank. Exactly what brokers/banks that are supported should be listed somewhere and linked here, as that's a "make or break" feature for a lot of people I bet. Not much point in replacing my homegrown "Banks CSV export -> Data processing > Import into spreadsheet" workflow unless I just replace that last step but the previous ones remain the same.

progforlyfe 2y ago
That's what I was wondering. It's a ton of work, but would love the auto importing / screen scraping features that Mint.com had. For a local desktop tool it even has the potential to support every possible service because they can't do IP blocking on end-users (versus the server-to-server model that Mint.com had, caused many services to IP block Mint's servers). Unfortunately, depending on an open-source tool to do this is a double edged sword if it had these features, because we would be opening the risk of supply-chain attacks -- malicious actors getting commits into the repository code which cause the program to send your data elsewhere -- or worse, deplete accounts' funds.
- diggan 2y ago
  > but would love the auto importing / screen scraping features that Mint.com had I never used it, but didn't that ask you for the username/password in order to do its job? If so, I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole. > cause the program to send your data elsewhere -- or worse, deplete accounts' funds. Again, seemingly because their shitty architecture would that even be possible. There are modern (possibly only European?) standards nowadays that forces the banks to expose proper APIs for doing things like that. Would require a business entity to deploy to production (I think that's one of the requirements?) but otherwise wouldn't be a huge task compared to manually scraping stuff.
  - nightski 2y ago
    Some banks allow you to create separate limited read only credentials at least that can be revoked at any time. But not all of them allow this.
    - al_borland 2y ago
      I used Every Dollar for budgeting for a while. It seemed mixed. Some banks used auth through the bank that would create a token for the site/app, which could be revoked through my account when the bank. Others used a 3rd party service which required the user enter their bank creds, and seemingly trust them. I was in the market for a new bank, so I ended up coming up with my short list of banks I’d look at moving to, then went to Every Dollar to try adding accounts to see what kind of prompt I was met with. Anything that required the 3rd party to store my creds was out of the running. I ended up ending a 20+ year relationship with a bank of this. There were other things too, but this was the straw that got me to actually cut ties. I assume Mint was similar. I used it a long time ago, probably when I was more trusting in my youth.
  - j-a-a-p 2y ago
    I suppose you mean PSD2. That is mandatory for EU banks that do payments. I don't think your stock and crypto trading services need to comply.
- jfdjkfdhjds 2y ago
  only if there were regulations for consumer banking having the bare minimum for application security as is for everything else banks themselves depend on.
- mulmen 2y ago
  > Unfortunately, depending on an open-source tool to do this is a double edged sword if it had these features, because we would be opening the risk of supply-chain attacks -- malicious actors getting commits into the repository code which cause the program to send your data elsewhere -- or worse, deplete accounts' funds. This is FUD. You’re describing open-commit, which I don’t think anyone does. Open source is not more susceptible to supply chain attacks than closed source software.
neilv 2y ago
I don't know about Wealthfolio, but the import QFX/OFX/CSV/etc. into GnuCash has ways to reconcile that with transactions you've manually recorded/edited, which can be much richer than the bank or CC knows. (GnuCash also has a way to import via network access, but I haven't tried it.) (Example of richness: splitting am Amazon CC charge into the multiple expense accounts for the items that went into the order, and also accounting for the CC rewards and the Gift Card balance that contributed.) I tried taking a break from GnuCash for maybe year, and going to a spreadsheet, and found: (1) it was still substantial work to maintain an accurate view of balances, and (2) I was missing a lot of information I found I needed in practice.
- jsdwarf 2y ago
  That's exactly my problem. Assigning the purchase of a new computer mouse to the "Expenses:ITEquipment" account? Easy if you purchased the mouse at your local computer store and used your debit card. Just define a text pattern to make any purchase from that store go to the ITEquipment account and run it against the csv from your checkings account. Same purchase from amazon? Difficult, because you have two layers of indirection: checking account > credit card > amazon > it equipment. Currently testing a new spreadsheet approach to deal with such scenarios, but not easy.
  - ska 2y ago
    Isnt' why splits exist though? I've never found that to be onerous, and I did run a small business on it for a while. Then again I'd never trust rules to do everything right anyway, so I'm reviewing at least once to reconcile.
  - dmohs 2y ago
    You just need one more account. The card payment is just a transfer to an "Amazon Balance" account or something. Then the individual items are entries against that account.
klinquist 2y ago
I just assumed it uses Plaid.
- diggan 2y ago
  I assume it uses no external services at all as it's supposed to be local first and "No Cloud" is basically the first thing you see when opening up the landing page. Not to mention the second paragraph is "no more worries about SaaS services playing around with your data"
- aketchum 2y ago
  unlikely, who would pay the plaid bill here? they dont really have ala cart pricing - you have to create an account with them etc
  - arez 2y ago
    yep, it would be way too expensive
  - stavros 2y ago
    I can provide an API key, you can use their staging API that allows a few banks for free. That's what I do with a local script I wrote, I get my banks' balances once a week.
    - danielvanacker 2y ago
      They deprecated their staging API. The equivalent now is “limited production access”.
      - stavros 2y ago
        Ah really? That's too bad, I guess I haven't used mine in a while, but I was just about to again.
- jchook 2y ago
  Imagine if Plaid was open source...
brutal_boi 2y ago
For that very reason I tried selfhosting Actual Finance[1] but it is more of a budgeting app than a networth tracking app. I ended up coding a small exporter[2] since I already had some stack in place that queries SimpleFI[3], which essentially allows querying balance and transaction information for most US-based banks (read only); most similar to plaid but a lot more developer-friendly afaik. [1] https://actualbudget.com/ https://actualbudget.com/ [2] https://github.com/eduser25/simplefin-bridge-exporter https://github.com/eduser25/simplefin-bridge-exporter [3] https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/ https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- johntash 2y ago
  Do you have any experience with plaid to compare it to simplefin by any chance? I started a similar project with plaid before, but haven't really gone back to it since dev accounts became a lot more limited.
  - brutal_boi 2y ago
    I could not find a way to make or enroll as a dev in plaid; that was a while ago tho. SimpleFIN on the other hand seems to be pretty good for dev work; plus very responsive in terms of questions and requests. Can only speak good of them.
    - johntash 2y ago
      Thanks! I don't remember the exact steps, but I remember it being a PITA to sign up for plaid. I managed to get a dev account before realizing you can't use most banks without going through a more thorough verification/approval process. To do that, you have to (I think) have a paid account. SimpleFIN looks pretty.. simple, at least from a glance. When I get time, I'll actually give it a shot.
figmert 2y ago
I really feel like there should be a tool that wraps Woob[0] finance and provides something similar to Plaid, but self-hosted. There are some great finance apps that could then potentially integrate it to improve automation. Woob does a great job of providing a good API for automating the web, and sure, not everything works, but it's a good start. Unfortunately, it seems it's not very well known still. [0] https://woob.tech/ https://woob.tech/
- aketchum 2y ago
  this sounds incredibly hard to do - plaid's moat is that it is a bunch of work to keep up to date with all these different bank UI's, plus many banks have moved to OAuth which they only provide to trusted partners - like plaid. You cant get an oauth token to your BofA account just because you have an account there
a-fadil 2y ago
For now only a standard csv file is supported with these columns: Date, Symbol, Quantity, Activity Type, Unit Price, Currency, and Fee. Supported activity types: BUY SELL DIVIDEND INTEREST DEPOSIT WITHDRAWAL TRANSFER_IN TRANSFER_OUT CONVERSION_IN CONVERSION_OUT FEE TAX Example CSV format: date,symbol,quantity,activityType,unitPrice,currency,fee 2024-01-01T15:02:36.329Z,MSFT,1,DIVIDEND,57.5,USD,0 2023-12-15T15:02:36.329Z,MSFT,30,BUY,368.6046511627907,USD,0 2023-08-11T14:55:30.863Z,$CASH-USD,600.03,DEPOSIT,1,USD,0
- cvoss 2y ago
  Seems like this arrangement of columns can't properly support dividends, as 1) there is no change to the held quantity when a dividend is issued, 2) the unit price of the symbol is irrelevant, and 3) there is no column to record the actual amount received. My bank records a quantity of 0 and a dummy unit price of $1. It would be incorrect for the bank to record a non-zero quantity.
  - anamexis 2y ago
    Why would that preclude supporting dividends? As you mentioned, unit price and quantity can simply be ignored for those rows.
dv_dt 2y ago
An tool (maybe AI) that processes PDF statements and outputs the structured importable positions & transactions would be appealing to me. No live online link to be compromised, or at lease a simpler fetch statement PDF scrape (vs maintain scrape of broker sites).
- jonromero 2y ago
  We try doing that with HeyFire.co - import from a screenshot that is processed on your browser! But with a high rate of hit or miss right now.
- halfdan 2y ago
  Portfolio Performance (http://portfolio-performance.app http://portfolio-performance.app) does just that.
  - bornfreddy 2y ago
    The link doesn't work for me, adding 'www.' prefix fixes it: https://www.portfolio-performance.app/ https://www.portfolio-performance.app/
Onavo 2y ago
I have found https://teller.io https://teller.io to be really good for this. They are more affordable than Plaid too at the lower end of scale. I have also seen some apps use https://www.simplefin.org/ https://www.simplefin.org/
jfdjkfdhjds 2y ago
it's open source... so all of them?
- groby_b 2y ago
  That's a somewhat useless statement. "I have a hello world on github. It's Open Source, so it can solve all your problems" is both true and not helpful at all.
ryandrake 2y ago
As an avid, daily Quicken user, yes, seamless integration with financial institutions is my #1 requirement. I am not willing to manually navigate a dozen banks' broken UIs to find their "download CSV" option, hope it works, download a bunch of files to my computer, and then hope that they can be imported into my application--and then repeat every day when I update. I have in the past switched physical banks purely because their integration was either terrible or not working and I refused to go the "download CSV" route. Unfortunately some banks are starting to drop support for applications directly connecting to them, and moving to an unacceptable model where intermediaries like Intuit's servers have to do the communication and store your credentials. This has been getting noticeably shittier in the last couple of years. My #2 requirement (a close second) is that the application must be running on my local PC. I will never accept a cloud-based web-app or something I have to host on a VPS and access through some dinky HTML/JS UI.
- ghosty141 2y ago
  > I am not willing to manually navigate a dozen banks' broken UIs to find their "download CSV" > My #2 requirement (a close second) is that the application must be running on my local PC. I will never accept a cloud-based web-app You're lucky you don't live in the EU since well then you are straight out of luck since the bank APIs are only available to commercial entities thus the software generally is in the cloud and costs money.
  - fmbb 2y ago
    Is it illegal for banks to provide private customers personal API access?
    - earnesti 2y ago
      I don't think it is illegal at all. Banks just don't want to offer such features.
    - franga2000 2y ago
      Not that I know of, but I've never seen one that does. And it's not like API access for company accounts is common - what the EU regulation requires, which is the only thing most babks support now, is that anyone can access their own accounts through a licensed account information provider. Under the "open banking" scheme, not even massive companies can get API access to their own accounts. It only requires banks to give service providers access that allows their customers to essentially OAuth login into those services with their bank accounts. There is no "I just want my own account" API, only the general one. And becoming a licensed provider is insanely hard because it's assumed you'll be actively managing millions of euros for tens of thousands of customers, when in reality, all you want is read-only access to one or a few affiliated accounts.
groby_b 2y ago
That's the core question. This is 99% of the value that any such tool provides. An open source project that had import flows for all the major banks & brokers into a well-defined unified format? Tremendous impact. A graphing tool that only imports a standardized CSV? I can do that in my spreadsheet in minutes.
rexreed 2y ago
The Spreadsheet-based workflow works very well for me as well. I have a feeling a very large % of people manage their personal finances on a spreadsheet. And it's private, not cloud based, backupable, and password protected.
- jaza 2y ago
  Ditto. Even though I'm quick to scream "that spreadsheet is an abomination, you need a database", actually, my personal finances spreadsheet is not an abomination (at least, I'd like to think it's not - and after having seen quite a few "enterprise spreadsheets" in my time, I'd like to think I'm familiar with most of the red flags these days), it's what spreadsheets were designed for. It helps me to appreciate why accountants will never ditch spreadsheets: you just can't beat their flexibility and ease-of-use. Although I choose convenience over privacy / no-cloud, Google Sheets FTW.

by diggan 2y ago

progforlyfe 2y ago

That's what I was wondering. It's a ton of work, but would love the auto importing / screen scraping features that Mint.com had. For a local desktop tool it even has the potential to support every possible service because they can't do IP blocking on end-users (versus the server-to-server model that Mint.com had, caused many services to IP block Mint's servers). Unfortunately, depending on an open-source tool to do this is a double edged sword if it had these features, because we would be opening the risk of supply-chain attacks -- malicious actors getting commits into the repository code which cause the program to send your data elsewhere -- or worse, deplete accounts' funds.

diggan 2y ago
> but would love the auto importing / screen scraping features that Mint.com had I never used it, but didn't that ask you for the username/password in order to do its job? If so, I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole. > cause the program to send your data elsewhere -- or worse, deplete accounts' funds. Again, seemingly because their shitty architecture would that even be possible. There are modern (possibly only European?) standards nowadays that forces the banks to expose proper APIs for doing things like that. Would require a business entity to deploy to production (I think that's one of the requirements?) but otherwise wouldn't be a huge task compared to manually scraping stuff.
- nightski 2y ago
  Some banks allow you to create separate limited read only credentials at least that can be revoked at any time. But not all of them allow this.
  - al_borland 2y ago
    I used Every Dollar for budgeting for a while. It seemed mixed. Some banks used auth through the bank that would create a token for the site/app, which could be revoked through my account when the bank. Others used a 3rd party service which required the user enter their bank creds, and seemingly trust them. I was in the market for a new bank, so I ended up coming up with my short list of banks I’d look at moving to, then went to Every Dollar to try adding accounts to see what kind of prompt I was met with. Anything that required the 3rd party to store my creds was out of the running. I ended up ending a 20+ year relationship with a bank of this. There were other things too, but this was the straw that got me to actually cut ties. I assume Mint was similar. I used it a long time ago, probably when I was more trusting in my youth.
- j-a-a-p 2y ago
  I suppose you mean PSD2. That is mandatory for EU banks that do payments. I don't think your stock and crypto trading services need to comply.
jfdjkfdhjds 2y ago
only if there were regulations for consumer banking having the bare minimum for application security as is for everything else banks themselves depend on.
mulmen 2y ago
> Unfortunately, depending on an open-source tool to do this is a double edged sword if it had these features, because we would be opening the risk of supply-chain attacks -- malicious actors getting commits into the repository code which cause the program to send your data elsewhere -- or worse, deplete accounts' funds. This is FUD. You’re describing open-commit, which I don’t think anyone does. Open source is not more susceptible to supply chain attacks than closed source software.

neilv 2y ago

I don't know about Wealthfolio, but the import QFX/OFX/CSV/etc. into GnuCash has ways to reconcile that with transactions you've manually recorded/edited, which can be much richer than the bank or CC knows. (GnuCash also has a way to import via network access, but I haven't tried it.) (Example of richness: splitting am Amazon CC charge into the multiple expense accounts for the items that went into the order, and also accounting for the CC rewards and the Gift Card balance that contributed.) I tried taking a break from GnuCash for maybe year, and going to a spreadsheet, and found: (1) it was still substantial work to maintain an accurate view of balances, and (2) I was missing a lot of information I found I needed in practice.

jsdwarf 2y ago
That's exactly my problem. Assigning the purchase of a new computer mouse to the "Expenses:ITEquipment" account? Easy if you purchased the mouse at your local computer store and used your debit card. Just define a text pattern to make any purchase from that store go to the ITEquipment account and run it against the csv from your checkings account. Same purchase from amazon? Difficult, because you have two layers of indirection: checking account > credit card > amazon > it equipment. Currently testing a new spreadsheet approach to deal with such scenarios, but not easy.
- ska 2y ago
  Isnt' why splits exist though? I've never found that to be onerous, and I did run a small business on it for a while. Then again I'd never trust rules to do everything right anyway, so I'm reviewing at least once to reconcile.
- dmohs 2y ago
  You just need one more account. The card payment is just a transfer to an "Amazon Balance" account or something. Then the individual items are entries against that account.

klinquist 2y ago

I just assumed it uses Plaid.

diggan 2y ago
I assume it uses no external services at all as it's supposed to be local first and "No Cloud" is basically the first thing you see when opening up the landing page. Not to mention the second paragraph is "no more worries about SaaS services playing around with your data"
aketchum 2y ago
unlikely, who would pay the plaid bill here? they dont really have ala cart pricing - you have to create an account with them etc
- arez 2y ago
  yep, it would be way too expensive
- stavros 2y ago
  I can provide an API key, you can use their staging API that allows a few banks for free. That's what I do with a local script I wrote, I get my banks' balances once a week.
  - danielvanacker 2y ago
    They deprecated their staging API. The equivalent now is “limited production access”.
    - stavros 2y ago
      Ah really? That's too bad, I guess I haven't used mine in a while, but I was just about to again.
jchook 2y ago
Imagine if Plaid was open source...

brutal_boi 2y ago

For that very reason I tried selfhosting Actual Finance[1] but it is more of a budgeting app than a networth tracking app. I ended up coding a small exporter[2] since I already had some stack in place that queries SimpleFI[3], which essentially allows querying balance and transaction information for most US-based banks (read only); most similar to plaid but a lot more developer-friendly afaik. [1] https://actualbudget.com/ https://actualbudget.com/ [2] https://github.com/eduser25/simplefin-bridge-exporter https://github.com/eduser25/simplefin-bridge-exporter [3] https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/ https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
johntash 2y ago
Do you have any experience with plaid to compare it to simplefin by any chance? I started a similar project with plaid before, but haven't really gone back to it since dev accounts became a lot more limited.
- brutal_boi 2y ago
  I could not find a way to make or enroll as a dev in plaid; that was a while ago tho. SimpleFIN on the other hand seems to be pretty good for dev work; plus very responsive in terms of questions and requests. Can only speak good of them.
  - johntash 2y ago
    Thanks! I don't remember the exact steps, but I remember it being a PITA to sign up for plaid. I managed to get a dev account before realizing you can't use most banks without going through a more thorough verification/approval process. To do that, you have to (I think) have a paid account. SimpleFIN looks pretty.. simple, at least from a glance. When I get time, I'll actually give it a shot.

figmert 2y ago

I really feel like there should be a tool that wraps Woob[0] finance and provides something similar to Plaid, but self-hosted. There are some great finance apps that could then potentially integrate it to improve automation. Woob does a great job of providing a good API for automating the web, and sure, not everything works, but it's a good start. Unfortunately, it seems it's not very well known still. [0] https://woob.tech/ https://woob.tech/

aketchum 2y ago
this sounds incredibly hard to do - plaid's moat is that it is a bunch of work to keep up to date with all these different bank UI's, plus many banks have moved to OAuth which they only provide to trusted partners - like plaid. You cant get an oauth token to your BofA account just because you have an account there

a-fadil 2y ago

For now only a standard csv file is supported with these columns: Date, Symbol, Quantity, Activity Type, Unit Price, Currency, and Fee. Supported activity types: BUY SELL DIVIDEND INTEREST DEPOSIT WITHDRAWAL TRANSFER_IN TRANSFER_OUT CONVERSION_IN CONVERSION_OUT FEE TAX Example CSV format: date,symbol,quantity,activityType,unitPrice,currency,fee 2024-01-01T15:02:36.329Z,MSFT,1,DIVIDEND,57.5,USD,0 2023-12-15T15:02:36.329Z,MSFT,30,BUY,368.6046511627907,USD,0 2023-08-11T14:55:30.863Z,$CASH-USD,600.03,DEPOSIT,1,USD,0

cvoss 2y ago
Seems like this arrangement of columns can't properly support dividends, as 1) there is no change to the held quantity when a dividend is issued, 2) the unit price of the symbol is irrelevant, and 3) there is no column to record the actual amount received. My bank records a quantity of 0 and a dummy unit price of $1. It would be incorrect for the bank to record a non-zero quantity.
- anamexis 2y ago
  Why would that preclude supporting dividends? As you mentioned, unit price and quantity can simply be ignored for those rows.

dv_dt 2y ago

An tool (maybe AI) that processes PDF statements and outputs the structured importable positions & transactions would be appealing to me. No live online link to be compromised, or at lease a simpler fetch statement PDF scrape (vs maintain scrape of broker sites).

jonromero 2y ago
We try doing that with HeyFire.co - import from a screenshot that is processed on your browser! But with a high rate of hit or miss right now.
halfdan 2y ago
Portfolio Performance (http://portfolio-performance.app http://portfolio-performance.app) does just that.
- bornfreddy 2y ago
  The link doesn't work for me, adding 'www.' prefix fixes it: https://www.portfolio-performance.app/ https://www.portfolio-performance.app/

Onavo 2y ago

I have found https://teller.io https://teller.io to be really good for this. They are more affordable than Plaid too at the lower end of scale. I have also seen some apps use https://www.simplefin.org/ https://www.simplefin.org/

jfdjkfdhjds 2y ago

it's open source... so all of them?

groby_b 2y ago
That's a somewhat useless statement. "I have a hello world on github. It's Open Source, so it can solve all your problems" is both true and not helpful at all.

ryandrake 2y ago

As an avid, daily Quicken user, yes, seamless integration with financial institutions is my #1 requirement. I am not willing to manually navigate a dozen banks' broken UIs to find their "download CSV" option, hope it works, download a bunch of files to my computer, and then hope that they can be imported into my application--and then repeat every day when I update. I have in the past switched physical banks purely because their integration was either terrible or not working and I refused to go the "download CSV" route. Unfortunately some banks are starting to drop support for applications directly connecting to them, and moving to an unacceptable model where intermediaries like Intuit's servers have to do the communication and store your credentials. This has been getting noticeably shittier in the last couple of years. My #2 requirement (a close second) is that the application must be running on my local PC. I will never accept a cloud-based web-app or something I have to host on a VPS and access through some dinky HTML/JS UI.

ghosty141 2y ago
> I am not willing to manually navigate a dozen banks' broken UIs to find their "download CSV" > My #2 requirement (a close second) is that the application must be running on my local PC. I will never accept a cloud-based web-app You're lucky you don't live in the EU since well then you are straight out of luck since the bank APIs are only available to commercial entities thus the software generally is in the cloud and costs money.
- fmbb 2y ago
  Is it illegal for banks to provide private customers personal API access?
  - earnesti 2y ago
    I don't think it is illegal at all. Banks just don't want to offer such features.
  - franga2000 2y ago
    Not that I know of, but I've never seen one that does. And it's not like API access for company accounts is common - what the EU regulation requires, which is the only thing most babks support now, is that anyone can access their own accounts through a licensed account information provider. Under the "open banking" scheme, not even massive companies can get API access to their own accounts. It only requires banks to give service providers access that allows their customers to essentially OAuth login into those services with their bank accounts. There is no "I just want my own account" API, only the general one. And becoming a licensed provider is insanely hard because it's assumed you'll be actively managing millions of euros for tens of thousands of customers, when in reality, all you want is read-only access to one or a few affiliated accounts.

groby_b 2y ago

That's the core question. This is 99% of the value that any such tool provides. An open source project that had import flows for all the major banks & brokers into a well-defined unified format? Tremendous impact. A graphing tool that only imports a standardized CSV? I can do that in my spreadsheet in minutes.

rexreed 2y ago

The Spreadsheet-based workflow works very well for me as well. I have a feeling a very large % of people manage their personal finances on a spreadsheet. And it's private, not cloud based, backupable, and password protected.

jaza 2y ago
Ditto. Even though I'm quick to scream "that spreadsheet is an abomination, you need a database", actually, my personal finances spreadsheet is not an abomination (at least, I'd like to think it's not - and after having seen quite a few "enterprise spreadsheets" in my time, I'd like to think I'm familiar with most of the red flags these days), it's what spreadsheets were designed for. It helps me to appreciate why accountants will never ditch spreadsheets: you just can't beat their flexibility and ease-of-use. Although I choose convenience over privacy / no-cloud, Google Sheets FTW.