For example, take a trip to Walmart where you purchased things that cross like 3 or 4 categories. With a system relying on importing data from your bank, a couple days after the transaction posts you'll have this generic assignment to Walmart, and you must then try and remember how to split it (eg between Groceries, Clothes, Technology etc). Instead, I have my transaction manually sorted in my YNAB app before I've even left the store.
I'm still waiting for the next step in these apps, where I connect my account to Walmart/Amazon/Target/etc and it can do item/category breakdowns automatically based on the actual line items in the order.
Otherwise, I am with you. I use a much simpler system without categories but I manually enter every dollar I spend right when I spend it.
Amazon order confirmation emails used to list the products. Now they don't. Some other company might use that information, so the user can't have it.
edit Amazon does provide an Orders API that at a glance seems like it would work for this case, but there's probably some underlying restrictions I am unaware of. https://docs.developer.amazonservices.com/en_US/orders-2013-...
The original idea was to make it hard (or at least with some friction) to create transactions. This also excluded any way of importing data. That way you feel your transactions twice. Once when you spend the money, and twice when you have to enter it.
Making you finances tangible is a very good way of spending less money. Importing all your shit just gives GIGO but with nicer graphics.
For my partner and me, I keep an OpenOffice spreadsheet were I enter all expenses, so we know who owes whom how much. Also, I scan all my receipts and they are automatically renamed and moved based on patterns (paperless-ng).
I agree to your argument, seeing all your expenses in this way helps keeping a connection to how much is spend. I yet need to combine my two systems with firefly.
Do you scan (presumably photo with phone?) and then autodetermine the cost and maybe even some sub-category breakouts?
https://docs.firefly-iii.org/firefly-iii/about-firefly-iii/w...
I will admit that I caved under pressure and built the Firefly III Data Importer:
Once the transaction data is available, it is trivial to auto categorize it and create dashboards. I’ve blogged about my own process/tools for that here [2]
* Run the data-importer as a separate container. Takes maybe 20 minutes to configure correctly if you already know docker and docker-compose.
* Download the transactions as CSVs from each of my 5 or so credit card and bank accounts that get regular use.
* Upload them through the data-importer. It lets you configure and save settings for each CSV format. I took five minutes to set that up the first time I imported CSVs and just keeping using the same settings.
I upload all of my transactions once a month and it takes about an hour to download them, import them, and categorize all of them (I also have a bunch of rules to auto-categorize, but there are inevitably a dozen or so bespoke transactions).
I've found that any of the solutions built on top of syncing backends like Plaid inevitably have issues: duplicates, missing txs, debit/credit mixed up. I even built my own custom Plaid-to-Firefly syncer at one point and found the data quality was very mixed, even when all my accounts are at major US banks. The data-importer takes some more up-front work, but it's more secure, way more predictable, and generally a solved problem.
The two issues I have had:
1. Have to reauthorize bank connection, but that's Plaid's issue I guess.
2. Payee names are all over the place because it's often the merchant name. I used to try and fix these and only have a single page payee for each entity, but gave up.
I have two banks and one CC that use an OAuth type system now.
Sure “everyone does it”, but most banks have disclaimers in their terms of service that if you lose money because your password was compromised through password sharing they aren’t liable for that loss.
I instead built a series of playwright scripts to automate signing into my bank accounts and downloading the CV, then importing (to lunch money, but I might take a look at this later as an option).
https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/blog/europes-new-api-...
There's no reason (beyond the general dysfunction of our legislature) that the US couldn't pass a similar law. Failing to do so is holding back out banking industry and making us all dramatically less secure.
We desperately need to mandate banks provide this kind of access. It's absolutely ludicrous that I don't have a way to give various services READ-ONLY access to my bank account information. It seems intolerable to me that I would have to give WRITE access to Plaid for them to enable someone to categorize my transactions.
> We regret to inform you that temporarily Salt Edge does not provide its services on the USA market.
in theory interactive brokers could link in my accounts but since I'm based in Switzerland this doesn't work. Sad. :)
I switched from a decade old spreadsheet to YNAB. Then it went subscription and online only. It relied on the Adobe Air runtime which stopped working in macOS several years ago (32-bit only).
I haven’t looked at firefly yet, but I really want something that allows me to forecast expenses, and realize them as they occur and automatically adjust forecasts accordingly.
It's on GitHub: https://github.com/banesto/YNAB4-64bit/blob/main/install
I could've sworn several years ago it was perfectly possible to use your sign-in credentials, then immediately change them, because it basically needed an authorization token, but then worked fine.
Now it doesn't. I work for a company with a Plaid integration and if the bank so much as requires any kind of 2FA, you just can't use it at all anymore.
If Plaid is every compromised in a way that leads to a loss of your funds in your account (probably unlikely), your bank likely has no legal requirement to make you whole for that, if you shared your password with Plaid.
I just don’t think you should share your bank password with any external entity.
I suppose something like Firefly could create a module (or even sell one) that is preconfigured, and updated, with the best method for each bank - download csv, api, scrape, etc. In fact, they could charge for that service and fund development.
Do people just give up on granularity, or how does it work?
YNAB offers the ability to split transactions over different categories so categorizing an Amazon purchase is trivial.
In the case of physical receipts you can enter them before they are synced from your credit card and YNAB does a great job matching uncleared transactions back with the cleared ones.
Paypal purchases always have the merchant attached to them, so you should be able to differentiate them regardless of the budgeting app you use.
(Personally, rather than fetch, I save OFX or QFX files from each US financial institution periodically. So that I can import them now into GnuCash, and also potentially import them into some other tool maybe decades into the future.)
I've been using (and manual-entering transactions in) Firefly-III for over 2 years. It's a good, old piece of software, but isn't scalable to our "high-frequency / busy / real-time" banking needs.
I've experimented with hacks like reading from bank transaction mails, using Tasker (Android) to read transaction SMSs, but alas the setup is cumbersome and not reliable.