I hear you. You either do it well or not at all. Yea…
So is there anything Julia-related that come out of all of this…? 
Lol, I don’t know. The underlying functionality isn’t all that complex - it’s mostly a matter of having a useful UI I think. Someone made a clone in google sheets IIRC. I’ve got very little experience with UI/web stuff, but if there was an effort to implement this in julia, I’d definitely be a committer. It would be a heavy lift to get my wife to switch, but…
Maybe useful reading: Reversing the YNAB file format - Part 1: JSON Structure – Jack Turnbull
Sheesh. I’d rather use the rules and build something that makes that usage easier. Not to sound too simplistic, I now remember that a wallet with n pockets in it, each for one category, each with the assigned amount of cash in it, is the simplest way to implement YNAB’s philosophy…
Indeed. Their format is particularly messy. But the underlying ideas are straightforward. I’m happy to share some examples of how my wife and I use the software and how I think of the underlying data structure in my head if you actually want to move forward on this
Other reading. There are also a number of examples just using google sheets - it definitely doesn’t need to be overly complex.
Thanks. But seriously, isn’t it just having a budget and a status report of where your spending is in relations to that budget? Kind of like that diagram for the Restaurant I made (but for all the categories)? Super simple stuff. I’ll think about this some more, but you have to admit that my idea with the wallet is pretty straight forward…
I had also thought about this quite a bit about a year ago. The biggest hurdle that prevented me from moving forward is getting the data. I absolutely did not want to manually export CSVs from each of my accounts. That stopped me in my tracks. If you can get around that step, I’d be happy to contribute.
This is impossible as far as I can tell. For one, even if you some how by some miracle find a bank that allows you to get to this data (I couldn’t find one), then that’s just one bank, in one country. The open source attitude is quite lost on these kind of institutions. It’s our money, but their information (though it shouldn’t be).
Unless I’m missing something? If we all move to BTC…?
Right, you’ll probably never be able to just query their database and retrieve account information. Many of them do have some option to export to CSV, though. So I had thought about trying to programmatically log in to the account and download the CSV. Again, too much work for my tastes at the time (and now).
Like a clicking robot…? I like that idea, but even that is not gonna work in some of the cases. All the banks in Sweden require you log on with an app on your phone, so the coordination requires a human involvement…
Google up the OpenBanking API.
We’re moving towards it being a real thing everywhere.
Until that day, all the profesional accounting packages like MYOB etc do have API access to banks,
but that is because they have setup a deal with each bank individually
I have heard of people buying a Xero subscription purely to leverage its API access to financial institutions for their own applcations.
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I was positively shocked to discover that 3 major banks here in Sweden started porting this kind of API! That’s great! I need to look a bit closer, but there might be a way for me to access my own transactions. It seems like it’s catering mostly for 3rd party app developers. Exciting…
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Checked it out some more and – regardless of if it’s a good or bad thing – the access to the transactions list will (probably) elicit the manual approval of the customer (i.e. me). Every time. So this is intended to work as an app where you open the app, approve the access, and see the generated stats… So we could build something that would require your manual approval (at least here in Sweden it’s done via BankID), and then the stats get generated. Which is still better than manually logging into your bank, manually clicking till you download all the xlsx and csv files, and then the stats get generated.
I’m just not sure if it’s worth learning their API. Extra irritating that they couldn’t agree on one single API to rule them all.
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Personal Capital and Mint get financial data from most institutions, although I’m not sure how – do they scrape the bank’s website? Either way, presumably you could do that too?
The answer is Yodlee.
In the UK, there is now a regulatory requirement for banks to support an open API, but it is still restricted to approved vendors. Hopefully it will be opened up to individuals eventually. https://www.openbanking.org.uk/
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