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Comment by Alifatisk | Hacker News Reader

I wish I could get data about my transactions through an api from my bank

I also wish this. I initially tried to build direct integrations to my financial institutions from Firefly, but found that none of them (mine, at least) give API access to their peon customers, you have to be a full-on fintech company. I eventually just built an integration [0] with Plaid since it seemed the most mature solution for where I live (US) and I've been fairly happy with the results. My main irritation is that Plaid used to be free if you were just using it with a few institutions, but is going to be paid-only in a few months. The prices do seem fairly reasonable ($.30/institution/month for transactions), so I'll probably stick with it.

[0]: https://github.com/dvankley/firefly-plaid-connector-2

Consider SimpleFin Bridge [0] - it's essentially a wrapper around MX (Plaid competitor) that lets you very simply pull your own credit card/bank data for $15/yr.

[0] https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/

I checked it for many common German banks and it doesn't work.

Checkout GoCardless[1]. This is used in the Actual Budget[2] Project for bank sync in Europe.

[1] https://bankaccountdata.gocardless.com/overview/

[2] https://actualbudget.org

Thanks, that's great!

Firefly kinda worked around this. You can download all transactions of your bank as a CSV, then use the Firefly importer to automatically map the data and save it inside Firefly. I usually do this once a week and it works pretty quickly, maybe a minute of work.

This certainly works well if you only need to track one account, but my finances aren't even _that_ complicated and I still have accounts I try to keep up to date with five different banks (hometown bank with checking/savings, two credit cards, employer-sponsored retirement account with Fidelity, and a three-fund portfolio with Vanguard). All of those accounts have 2FA, so logging into each one, navigating to the download screen, and downloading it into the right spot easily adds up to fifteen minutes of work.

Ironically, I've found that since I started to rely more on downloading the CSVs and importing them (as opposed to entering everything by hand), I've been entering things less regularly because of the increased start up time. If each account just had an API to pull transactions, I could schedule a job to download everything daily and life would be so much better.

I was looking into getting a virtual accountant to log into my few accounts, download CSVs, import and reconcile. But like you said, the most annoying thing about this is logging in, waiting for dumb SMS-based 2FA, selecting date range, logging into a different browser since Safari isn't supported properly, etc etc.

I'm unsure if providing the virtual accountant bank credentials is more or less secure than Plaid/Yodlee, but this is a major pain point.

>You can download all transactions of your bank as a CSV

Unless you have an Apple Card. I went to download last year's transactions and found out that they only allow you to download a PDF statement for each month!

Apple isn't known for inter-operating well with anything.

That’s not true. You can export transactions in a variety of formats, including CSV, the button is right below the button to export a PDF.

It takes me more than a minute just to download CSV transactions from one source. I have 10 sources of data. :)

I'm only using it for tracking, not budgeting, so I do it maybe every 1-2 months.

Yes, but idk where you are, in the EU we have this PSD2 rule or law, which adds 2FA to every action, not just transaction, making it impossible to automate and forcing you to use a 3rd party service, which costs about 30€ / month of you'd like to automate.

Before PSD2, at least German banks had a free api one could automatically query.

The EU claims it's done because of "security".

Essentially corruption.

Your bank and your implementation can use TOTP just fine while meeting a 2FA requirement.

But why does the Comdirect still offer a free API to their retail customers? https://www.comdirect.de/cms/kontakt-zugaenge-api.html

I wish all banks were forced to implement the same API.

That‘s the case in the EU.

I wish I could import my historical statements, is there any good tool for scraping transactions from PDF files? Maybe some kind of tweakable framework where you can customize for your institution's particular layout?

Woob is the only viable OSS solution at this point

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