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Comment by reacharavindh | Hacker News Reader

As nice as the tool and the insights it provides, the pain point is manually entering all the transactions. It is 2018, and we still dont have a easy way of exporting our transactions from the bank in a standard way. Every bank wants to use their own way of exporting it.

I was seriously considering using Plaid API[1] to build an app that would download my transactions automatically, categorise it, and prompt me to only verify entries it classified with low-confidence. But, Plaid API at the time did not support all my bank accounts, which made the effort moot.

Another concern of mine is exporting such personal data to a 3rd party. Ideally, an open source tool that strictly runs on my laptop would be the best!

[1] - https://plaid.com

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Entering transactions manually is THE POINT of HoneyMoney. You need to pay attention to your money to change your habits. Manual tracking forces you to keep your money under your regular supervision.

There're a lot of tools which will automatically import your transactions. HoneyMoney chooses the different way, trying to make tracking and planning a habit, promoting the idea that nobody can do this work for you.

It just tries to simplify the process and make it enjoyable.

That's all well and good, but I have too many daily transactions to make that feasible (too many accounts for that matter). IMO, that level of manual tracking is a bug, not a feature. If I want manual tracking, I can use Excel.

Accounting is neither simple nor enjoyable, and a computer can easily do it for us. Why not figure out how to make the process automated but still form the habit of actively tracking one's finances?

There're already tools which choose to do "automated" tracking. HoneyMoney caters to people who want to do it manually (more control, security, precision).

The thing is that Excel is not designed to help you with manual tracking. HoneyMoney is. For example, you can plan all recurring transactions and then you just confirm them as they happen. Or you can combine multiple transactions into one. Those things simplify the process a lot.

"Accounting" can be enjoyable. Some people do enjoy the level of control they get from doing their personal finances.

For example, you spend $120 at a restaurant last night. Today you enter that expense into HoneyMoney, and have a chance to see how this expense changed your situation, and think for a moment a second time about it, was it worth it or better not go there again. Computer won't do it for you.

In Europe the PSD2 regulations are just about to come into effect which means that all banks will have to provide a public API. You can also use an aggregation service like Tink (https://business.tink.se)

I really like Europe. Why is a cluster of countries functioning better than a single country?

You might ask some Greeks how they think it is functioning and you might change your view a bit.

Thanks!

I just learnt about PSD2. I live in Denmark. Unfortunately I don't see Danskebank to be a part of supported list on Tink.

I will look into how I can get an API for Danskebank account transactions.

Using a smartphone app, entering the transaction isn't really such a pain. Just bought a pretzel, 12 secs later I had it entered in the app.

What I want in contrast is a way of tracking complex expenses like supermarket receipts, maybe via OCR and automatic aggregation and categorization of items, even across different supermarkets. Preferably via app. That way I could check which items I should buy where and which items are the most demanding on my monthly budget. Any su

there's lots of transactions people have happen automatically - rent, utilities, etc.

In YNAB at least, all of those can be scheduled as recurring and you only have to mark them cleared when they've happened.

rent would probably make sense. my utilities change each month, so "recurring" as an event makes sense, but not the amount.

Utilities costs are almost always variable, so it would still require manually entering them in.

Switch banks, seriously, and tell them why. Banks are a dime a dozen. My local credit union exports in QFX, OFX, and CSV. Also has direct access (I use Ibank on Mac) so I don’t have to futz with exporting. As you said, it’s the 21st century. No excuse for this.

I started using Tiller for this recently. It’s essentially a shim later between Yodlee and Google Sheets. It doesn’t address your privacy concerns, of course, but I don’t think there’s any good solution outside of paying your banks for OFX access.

I don’t use any of their sheet templates. I just download the raw transactions with the Sheets API and munge then into my ledger-cli based analysis system.

https://www.tillerhq.com

In Europe, all banks implement the HBCI standard, which does exactly this.

What do you mean by "this"? I'm in Europe and all my bank accounts are very "closed", as in really difficult to build an API on. Good for security but hopeless for anything else like expense tracking.

They do offer CSV export, not even sure if that's in any standardised way.

HBCI is mostly a German standard though. It is a huge PITA to work with as well, clearly showing its age.

The most promising thing seems to be the API standard developed by the "Berlin Group" https://www.berlin-group.org/psd2-access-to-bank-accounts with quite a lot of banks being a member.

I quite liked the bunq API to work with (https://doc.bunq.com), but I wasn't really happy with their 7.99€/month pricing. In the past they also required a fixed IP, which wasn't really great for hobby projects.

A decent wrapper around multiple bank APIs seems to be figo (http://docs.figo.io/v3/index.html), the API looks good but I'm not sure about the pricing.

It's a PITA, but it works and it's a universal standard (in Germany, that is).

I'll take that over a proprietary API or an untrusted 3rd party wrapper.

Why not simply download the CSV of your bank statements on a monthly basis and process it however you wish? Just need a monthly habit for this to be working.

Personally, I use OFX, but that's just the beginning. For investment accounts, you need price and lot info, for loan repayments you need interest / principal splits, and for w2 income I have the gross pay split into a couple dozen accounts -- state and local taxes, various insurances, and retirement investments. Most of this stuff you can't even get from online banking APIs.

Because my bank doesn't offer CSV export.

Are there no budgeting apps that use plaid for transactions?

Not sure if it uses Plaid, but I use YNAB and it connects to all the accounts that are important to me.

(full disclosure, I work at Plaid)

Some of the more popular budgeting apps that are built on Plaid include Empower, Clarity Money, and Albert.

I particularly like to use HoneyDue, which is built for couples!

You know, HoneyDue is one of those rare things where a blockchain (just between the couple's devices) would make sense.

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