Introducing Money in Excel, an easier way to manage your finances | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Money in Excel, an easier way to manage your finances

microsoft.com

50 pointsyarapavan28 comments

I wish banks had API tokens, so that people didn't have to exchange their passwords for financial services.

Me too. But I doubt it will ever happen without regulation.

The only development in this space that I'm aware of is from a South African company called root. You can run custom code before/after transactions through their credit card. https://root.co.za/card

A few US banks (e.g. Capital One) provide a separate password for API access.

Unfortunately, it's rare.

The UK has implemented Open Banking [1] and PSD2 directive since late 2018.

It allows apps to interconnect and pull data - I can use a single banking app to check balances across all my accounts.

[1] https://www.openbanking.org.uk

PSD2 is EU-wide. (I hope the UK doesn't roll it back!)

Now if 'open' part of PSD2 open banking actually meant that I could access my own bank account api, that would be great :).

Unfortunately you need to be acredited to be able to get access to banks APIs and in order to get acredited there are certain requirements such as needing to be a legal entity. Alas, no dice for the enthusiasts.

Could enthusiasts not form a non profit entity to receive accreditation and delegate access?

There are other, such as capital, cash flow and licensing requirements.... As far as I can tell.

I was very disappointed when I found this out too. Fail.

There will probably be resellers offering api access to our own data (I think that's the deal with tokens.io) so... classic lobbiest produced walled garden to limit free enterprise and competition.

And don't forget the middlemen that monetize your de-identified data in exchange for providing the service :)

From https://help.mint.com/Accounts-and-Transactions/939542541/Wh...

> Mint now signs in to select banks using OAuth (open standard for authentication). ... Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Capital One

Can it connect to Amazon and extract my purchases and classify them? Almost all of our purchases are from Amazon these days and categorizing them as "Shopping" or "General Merchandise" is almost useless. Someone please let me know if this exists somewhere.

Aside from that I'd also love the ability to amortize some of these yearly payments I have. When you're trying to answer "How much money am I putting away each month" all of these random yearly, quarterly, one-time expenses end up ruining that.

Amazon doesn't expose that via an API, so the data you're after can't be gotten to easily. That said, there are a few options:

- This[1] report from Amazon gives you an incredibly detailed export of physical purchases. Caveat being that digital-only goods are missing, as well as items which didn't ship (either because you or because Amazon canceled the item prior to shipment). So depending on your purchase patterns, it may cover substantially all your needs or have so many holes in it as to be near useless.

- This[2] Github project exports your order history to a SQLite file. It's based on parsing/scraping the Order History pages themselves, so doesn't have the gap of the above report but also has the potential to break if/when Amazon changes the source code for the Orders page. The project hasn't been updated in several years, so no clue if the current parsing heuristics are valid or not.

- This[3] Github project is also based on scraping the Order History pages, but is much more recent than [2] and still being actively developed. However, [2] is designed as a ruby script that syncs a SQLite database whereas [3] runs as a Chrome extension.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/b2b/reports/

[2] https://github.com/chrisb/amazon-orders

[3] https://github.com/philipmulcahy/azad

The article says that they're using Plaid to make the connections. I imagine Plaid also powers the categorization of the data as well. This really just seems like a pretty wrapper of Plaid data, in which case, you probably won't get much value out of it if you're using other tools like YNAB.

MS Money reborn in Excel. I remember having to migrate my accounts away from MS Money.

would be curious what ynab users think of this?

I have used ynab and Quicken. The fundamental thing ynab was lacking for me was automatic pulling of data.

Quicken was too closed of a system and only supported a desktop version. So I gave up on both.

Excel looks promising since I am already familiar with the ecosystem, have excel skills and it isn't a closed system in that I can do whatever I want with the data easily. I'll check it out.

The new YNAB version does do automatic data pulling.

I could never understand how YNAB was supposed to work. Why do people like it so much?

every dollar has a purpose.. this isn't a ynab specific method.

ynab has written a number of articles about this technique.

here is one way i use ynab: what it allows me to do is gives me very good insight into the amount of money i need to save up each month for expenses that are due 6-12 months. i then take this money and place it in high-risk investment vehicles. sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes i don't invest.

I really wish there was more granular nomenclature around budgeting. "Budgeting" varies so much and the splash page rarely helps. So I will often have to download or sign up for the app, attach actual data (which I'm less than eager to do) and poke around. When looking at credit unions they touted their website's features but were surprised when I asked if there was a way I could demo it.

YNAB uses a variation of the "envelope method." You categorize money earned. Then that gets deducted by expenses. In meatspace you would take your paycheck in cash and split it into labeled envelopes and use that for spending. This is a simplification of what YNAB does and there are other free tools that use this method.

Mint and Money in Excel take transactions and categorize them. From there you can look at the history of the category or look at net worth or income/expense over time. When you set a "budget" it's just a number you set based on previous month's spending and it's unrelated to your income. These generally suck for non-monthly expenses like property tax or my bi-monthly trash bill.

YNAB /can/ do charts and trends, but they often encourage a "fresh start" which starts everything over and don't have great tools around historical data. So you can't look back that far. With Excel it's just a spreadsheet so if you have the data in any format you can pull it in.

I find it baffling that this template is inaccessible to users of Office 365 for business.

Exactly - this is a silly choice. Making it inaccessible to users of Office 365 for business is a terrible default choice.

That does seem silly on principle, but I doubt many Office 365 for Business users actually need such a thing anyway. Maybe it's some kind of bug or oversight?

It's not that baffling; Microsoft is selling Office 365 for Business for corporate accounts, and Office 365 Home for personal use, and expects users who have access to the former for corporate use to also have the latter for home use. Indeed, their Home Use Program which used to let corporate users let their employees purchase similar-level standalone products at a sharp discount to use on personal computers now has the primary option being a discount on Office 365 Home.

So, that it makes perfect sense that the personal finance solution that they intend to be a motivation to buy Office 365 Home isn't available on the Office 365 for Business accounts many of the people they want to sell Home to also already have access to.

I own a couple of extra licenses of Office 365 for Business that I've already paid for. I just want to check out the excel template- I don't need Office 365 for Home. I have a business license on the machine I use at home. I would pay something for the template. I'm not changing versions of excel and the whole suite just to check it out.

Ah man, excellent! The one thing I'm really missing in my current finance workflow is accidentally turning my money column into text and never being able to revert it!

So essentially it's Mint.

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