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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

I wish banks weren't actively sabotaging data export. I wrote some scripts for this in the past, reverse engineered the login with OCR, cleaned up the invalid entries, but... It's just too much effort to maintain this. Once the mobile confirmation started being required, I just gave up.

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I use beancount and I use ofxget for some accounts and then keep a CSV archive for the rest and wrote some scripts to sync them into beancount when a new file shows up. It's annoying to download everything and keep it organized, but it gives me better piece of mind than all the other SaSS accounting systems

I've found that so few of my accounts support ofxget that it's not worth the trouble of dealing with it. I just occasionally download year-to-date statements from all my accounts and then run scripts to convert them to ledger format and append only the things after a given cutoff date (things like the credit card script are pretty interactive so I don't want to overwrite the old data). To know which accounts are in most dire need of a check, I have a script that shows the last transaction on each statement-generating account.

This basically works for me and catching up doesn't really take long. There are some accounts that I update very infrequently, but I've gotten over my OCD about this and it doesn't really matter. My wife doesn't appreciate being hassled for the statement from her work HSA every month -- nor does it really matter how much is in there at any given moment, unless we have a big medical expense -- so we just occasionally sit down and catch everything up, maybe twice a year.

Overall I find the automation means it's vastly less work than when I used gnucash, and the flexibility in expense structures and ease of assigning things mean I have much better budget data than when I used mint.com.

Wish their was a standard data format that all banks would use.

The format exists - OFX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Financial_Exchange

But even banks that use it make massive mistakes and break the basic assumptions. Unique ID repeating in the same day for example. Or using the minutes in place of the month...

Banks are much less technological than the common stereotype about them. In fact, integrating or automating a bank is one of the worst things you can do. The list of easy integration goes like this:

  High-tech internet services
  Stock exchanges
  Websites with no API
  …
  Telcos
  …
  …
  Banks
  Unreachable rock bottom of insanity

You should see what the major players (especially MS) do to iCalendar. The standard has been around since at least 2009, with the last update in 2016, but none of the major players implements the standard correctly, and most utterly fail on VTODO, I suspect on purpose because to-do lists are actually useful.

I can't decide whether the failure to implement iCalendar and OFX standards properly are examples of incompetence or malice, but I suspect the latter with an eye to vendor or bank lock-in.

Working on calendar software is boring, so the big players likely give it to interns and new recruits. Office suites are so last century.

I don't think things will improve unless we find a way to shame big companies in paying attention and playing nice to each other, like it was done for HTML standards (pre-Google's monopolization).

I'll go with incompetence or lack of care. The issues I found were so bizarre/stupid, I would be worried for anyone who thought to make them on purpose.

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