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Comment by andrei_says_ | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn’t importing a credit card statement eliminate the need for manual entries?

I don’t use an expense tracking tool - apologies if my question may is missing context.

Most banks don't have an API, and statements are (often) lagged, sometimes even by a week or a month depending on how archaic the systems are.

Lots of providers exist for bank information, Plaid is one of them. That's what many of these auto import personal finance softwares use.

Having used Plaid, it is essentially web scraping as a service. It's an API built on top of very questionable access. It itself is not a formal API provided to you by the bank.

Yes it is (I never said it wasn't), but it works. They are working with banks to modernize their APIs as well.

The Canadian government has apparently introduced a framework for sharing your banking data securely with third parties (budgeting apps, financial products) in an effort to eliminate this shady screen scraping and credential sharing that a lot of these kind of apps do. Hoping they actually follow through...

https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/...

Easier said then done. Most softwares Ive used that attempted this did so poorly. However it is getting better.

Whatever happened to the Quick Interchange Format(.qif)? It used to be common for all banks to support that. A modern variant today could just be a XML or JSON export, and I hardly see that either.

I did that for a while, but I always spent a lot of time retracing my steps to properly label most transactions. I think I'll try the tool listed here, if it is simple enough to manually enter transactions I can do that every evening and get better data in the end than a monthly review.

i agree, intention behind this project is - select a category add cost and done! no tags, no wallets, no budgets

Actual Finance (similar open source software) does this via SimpleFIN Bridge. It even supported connecting a credit card option that rocket money doesn't.

How does one import credit card statements reliably in the USA?

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