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You make some excellent points, especially the one about banks and molasses. Scraping websites in general is subject to so much arbitrary change you tend to giv
by kinleyd 13y ago
You make some excellent points, especially the one about banks and molasses. Scraping websites in general is subject to so much arbitrary change you tend to give up after a while.
With reference to the rant about importing data directly into one's accounting software of choice, the random nature of bank data formats is more likely to render it impossible, especially for the application developers who I'd say would be weighed down with maintaining the core application.
I think the best option would be for the core accounting application to have a well defined format for import/export, leaving the work of getting data into that format for another application or project like the ones mentioned in other sub-threads here (simplefin.org looks interesting aready).
I currently use a FOSS (I think) Windows application called TurboCash (turbocash.net) which does a pretty good job, but also requires some working to get bank data in. I'm thinking of trying out ledger-cli, with some hack work on getting bank data in. With my recent drive toward the command line, I'm hoping this may be my accounting Valhalla.
- speleding 13y agoI solved my companies accounting needs with a bunch of Ruby scripts that scrape / download / convert from the banks and then output to ledger-cli. The cool thing is that ledger lets you script everything so you can write another Ruby script that outputs a CSV file that I can upload to the tax authorities. The end-of-quarter tax preparation went from a few days to a few hours. It works great for us but something breaks about once or twice a year when one of the 3 banks we interface with changes something, so I can see this being very hard to solve generically in a way that works all of the time for non-programmers. Still, I would recommend this solution to anyone who is comfortable with Ruby and ALSO comfortable with accounting because ledger is great but it also allows you to shoot yourself in the foot if you don't know what you're doing.
- kinleyd 13y agoI will be taking your route but with Clojure scripts. This should be fun.