shared bank download/reconciliation API

[Josh Berkus]

On 05/12/2014 12:37 PM, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> There are many free/open source accounting programs now.  One of the
> more tedious things that the developers can't keep up with is the
> download APIs of all the different banks around the world.
> 
> I came across one piece of middleware that attempts to take on some of
> this burden, that is the aqbanking module.  It is used by Gnucash and it
> seems to have a German market focus.
> 
> Is anybody aware of other middleware for solving this problem?
> 
> Can anybody see any demand for taking this further, e.g. making up a
> standalone tool that simply mirrors bank statements into a local SQL
> schema for use by other free software applications?

Yes, I can see a market for a tool which takes bank statements and
converts them to some predetermined format.  I'd tend to choose CSV or
JSON myself; there's no really strong reason you need a SQL database
available to make this work.

The most difficult part of the work would be figuring out what output
columns would cover the needs of most accounting programs.

Note that few banks have a true "API". In most cases, the user would
need to download the files manually and then feed them to the tool.

-- 
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com