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Comment by cmarschner | Hacker News Reader

I envy you, this has been my dream for years. But obscure payment gateways make this a task for the chosen few in this country. If somebody could point me to a workable solution (on Linux / cross platform) for Germany it would be highly appreciated.

“Every financial system is broken in its own way” (ex-coworker who had worked in financial services)

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I use `aqbanking-cli` for grabbing transactions from my banks' FinTS/HBCI API and generate a CSV out of that. That CSV then goes through a bit of Python that splits up the entries into transactions. Those get rendered out as `beancount` transactions (but `ledger` works as well, I used that before I switched to beancount) and appended to my actual ledger.

I then use `fava` (a beancount web UI) to fix mistakes, and have another piece of code (this time written in Go, but could be Python/whatever as well) that takes transactions that are generated from my brokerage account and enriches them with data parsed from my brokers' PDF reports (since the FinTS/HBCI info doesn't contain stuff like ISINs or taxes/fees separately).

This is for my personal finances, but I used the same system (minus the brokerage stuff) when I managed the finances of a hackerspace in the middle of Germany for a few years.

~Look for aqbanking and hbci/fints. Most of the major banks hace an endpoint, though you might have to google for the exact data~

Edit: Missed that his is about ledger-cli, not gnucash. Sorry.

Actually https://github.com/dpaetzel/buchhaltung could fit your needs. Just found it because I thought that someone must have built this already.

Ok. But written in Haskell? Why would you write this kind of stuff in anything but python - it’s trivial after all, and it should stay trivial through all layers…

There are companies that offer APIs to access bank accounts as a service. Plaid.com is one of them, although you might need to search around for another one that supports your bank.

At one point, there was a decent standard called "OFX" which financial institutions were supposed to support. It let you use an app like GNU Cash or QuickBooks which could automatically connect to your bank account. That died apparently and was replaced by some API/standard called "Open Banking". It's shittier in every way since it seems to require a middleman now (like Plaid) whereas with OFX you could just query an endpoint easily.

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