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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Does that require giving them your banking online login details?

Buy YNAB 4 (aka YNAB Classic). You'll have to import transactions manually, but I much prefer it to their subscription SaaS offering. I've used it for five years and love it.

I use a python script to download most transactions from banks/credit cards. https://sites.google.com/site/pocketsense/home/msmoneyfixp1/...

There are enough people who do this that you can figure out how to access the OFX endpoint for most financial institutions.

You can import transactions manually into NYNAB (the new web version).

One problem I have with relying on OFX is that I have a nagging suspicion that it's not as 'official' as the statements. If there were a discrepancy between the two, I'd worry that I wouldn't be able to resolve it in my favor without having reviewed (and thus downloaded and reconciled against) the statements.

I was in your same boat until the SaaS offering started really figuring out how to do credit cards. Now, it's finally the better of the two options for me.

There's yet another thing that's needed industry wide. Oauth or similar concept with read only access to a data api.

plaid.com

And Yodlee. Quovo. Tink. Finicity. A zillion others. This is where modern banking data is moving, for better or worse. I think it's better, but the world is still on it's first steps in this "more open" financial data linking space.

plaid asks for your online banking password.

We used to with something like quicken, but most banks half ass it.

I really think the state of how bad consumer bank integration tech is has led to this reality of login and scrape that you have with yodlee & co.

If you want auto-import, yes.

Otherwise, it requires only an email (and that you pay them 5$/monthly somehow. Paypal, credit card, whatever).

If you don't want auto-import (which doesn't even work for my credit union anyway), you can uploads .csvs, or manually input your transactions.

If you're concerned about that, you can always go with desktop software. Quicken will do "virtual accounts".

Or Free Software alternatives such as GNUcash.

LWN have a current "Grumpy Editor" series article on Beancount:

https://lwn.net/Articles/751874/

And an older one from 2009:

https://lwn.net/Articles/314577/

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