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Comment by 0xffff2 | Hacker News Reader

The reason I continue to use Quicken rather than writing my own tool that I'm sure doesn't sell my data is that it allows me to relatively painlessly sync transactions from my bank. This is largely my bank's fault for not exposing some kind of API I can hook into, but nonetheless any budgeting app that doesn't sync transactions from most financial institutions is not a "solution".

Just based on the single screenshot in the readme, it seems like the workflow needs work too. The information density in the screenshot looks painfully low to me.

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There's a hack I worked out years ago where you set up a dummy email account and have your bank notify it by email every time there's a transaction over $0.01. Do a little HTML crawling and you've got a transactions database.

Author of My Budget.

I'm currently working to get OFX supported, which is the "automatic API" that can scrape your transactions. Quicken uses this, falling back on screen scraping in case OFX isn't supported.

There are a number of features that I'd still like to add (documented here: https://github.com/reZach/my-budget/wiki/FAQ#future-features). Are there specific things you'd like to see that I can put on my roadmap?

OFX is a painful spec; hard to know what is and is not used by various banks.

I spent a bit of time writing a simple streaming OFXv1 (SGML) parser in Rust, but I'm too ashamed to open-source it. The idea behind it was you read the OFX file byte by byte, using Nom to parse out tokens, and emit events when you hit SGML tags and element content (SAX-parser style). Then you have something over the top of that that accumulates state until it has a complete OFX data element, and then emits that.

Advantage: Very low memory usage. Disadvantage: Probably overkill, since OFX files probably wouldn't be megabytes or gigabytes.

It works for my bank feed, but who knows how many other banks!

If you have any ideas on how to support this well in a non-hacky way that doesn't involve relying on a scripting language (all other existing implementations seem to be some form of scripting language :().

Please open source it! I'm sure people would be delighted to contribute once you do.

> Probably overkill, since OFX files probably wouldn't be megabytes or gigabytes.

Maybe not gigabytes, but if you wanted to pull transaction-level data from a relatively active brokerage account, you could end up with an OFX file of a couple of megabytes. I'm sure someone might appreciate the efficiency.

The one specific thing that stands out to me besides sync support is user-interface optimization. In Quicken I can see and edit my entire monthly budget on a single page, including adding/removing categories, seeing current spending/income for all categories, and editing spending/income targets. The screenshot in the readme prioritizes things I rarely care about (editing categories, individual transactions) instead of the things that I do care about (big picture view of my current/planned budget).

Have you looked into the plaid[0] free(test) tier? They hook into a bunch of different banks and the free tier exposes balance and transaction history.

[0]:https://plaid.com/

Do you know if they work with EU banks? I'm in France and this looks really interesting...

Author of My Budget here. Can you send me a message on the Slack channel (https://join.slack.com/t/my-budget/shared_invite/enQtNjA0NDg...) "zachary" and we can talk about more details.

If you have a free Plaid account, you might check out BudgetSheet: https://www.budgetsheet.net

It imports live bank transactions into a Google Sheet for you to use however you want.

I really wish I could find a service that would do this for something other than Google Sheets (or like Tiller using a Google login even though they can write to Microsoft's OneDrive...for some reason). The last place I want to store a bunch of sensitive financial information is Mint. The second last is Google.

To that end, I looked into using Plaid's API to craft my own but it's a bit daunting, especially with a couple of my financial institutions continually failing and having to be reauthenticated, so I don't envy these developers their tasks.

Where else would you want this imported? What other products do you use that you would wank your bank transactions in that you trust?

Their free tier is only 100 "imports". After that, you are looking to pay $500 USD/mo. for unlimited - which simply isn't an option for a free app.

Depending on your bank you might be able to import transactions with the tool I use for my finances (https://firefly-iii.org/): it can import using the Spectre/Salt Edge API or through CSV files.

There is now a wiki page on how to use the app. There is a link in the "Help" menu while using My Budget that takes you to this page: https://github.com/reZach/my-budget/wiki/New-user's-guide.

How does Quicken sync transactions without a bank API? Do you have to give it your bank credentials so it can scrape the site?

Yes, that is one of the ways Quicken scrapes information.

The "bank API" is actually OFX, it's a protocol banks use to send each other data. I'm currently working on trying to get OFX support in My Budget. (I'm the author of the Github project).

It seems insane that people would be okay with their bank credentials being stored in plaintext.

I signed up for a budgeting service that claimed real time transaction sync and immediately unsubscribed when I realised it was planning to do so by scraping.

People give their passwords to Mint, and I totally don't understand that.

The banks in the US won't cooperate, according to everyone I've heard stories from who are trying to break into, or have broken into, this space.

That’s still not a good reason to give your bank credentials and allow them to be stored in plain text. At that point if it’s your only option you just don’t do it.

Quicken at least claims to store the credentials locally and encrypted. How well it does this I don't know of course, but I consider it infinitely better than any online service, which is why I still use it despite the fact that it manages the impressive feat of being so slow that a web-based service would probably be faster in terms of UI performance.

TillerHQ does syncing with a google spreadsheet.

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