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Comment by bronco21016 | Hacker News Reader

I was really into this idea a few years ago. Even started logging.

However, I just cannot bring myself to constantly pull the transactions down manually from multiple banks.

Many suggest automating. How is this working in practice? Are there providers like Plaid you can use? Build web scrapers? Build PDF statement parsers?

I ended up just paying YNAB the $130/year or whatever they’re at now. High wife approval factor and everything just connects. They also have an API. In theory I could just constantly backup YNAB with PTA by pulling down transactions from the API.

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I went the "build a few PDF statement parsers" route.

Some I wrote by hand using PyMuPDF, some I coerced Claude into writing (again using PyMuPDF) by uploading a sample bill (I'd never put my own data into an LLM but it's nice being able to find a sample bill, gets it close enough to correct that I can do the remaining bits if there are variations in bills over time).

Overall it's effort (and yes certainly a bunch effort for manually downloading transactions). The financial industry is very behind on this stuff clearly. I'm not sure in a few years whether I'll still think it's worth the effort I put in, which has gone down over the past few months as I automate things, but until it stops being fun I'll keep going.

From this post, I just got mine setup this morning. I already enjoy going through my 18 accounts every 2 weeks on pay day (yes, every credit card is the highest for the category of spend). For me, it seems like it would be just one extra step for me to get the data every 2 weeks.

But for most, I understand that they aren’t enjoying what I am doing every couple of weeks. I was using YNAB before but due to how many cards I had something got messed up in the importer all the time. Sometimes my transactions would duplicate or even get triplicated and then I would decline one of them only for it to pop up again a few days later. This lead to a very messed up and not accurate tracking. For me I was just fighting this thing every single day.

This is probably user error but after wiping it 3 times and starting over and over I just gave up and went back to mentally keeping track which worked but I needed something better.

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