shared bank download/reconciliation API

Stefano Zacchiroli zack at upsilon.cc
Mon May 12 16:35:44 EDT 2014


On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 09:37:55PM +0200, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> 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?

The web out of browser project ( http://weboob.org/ , "apt-get install
weboob" on Debian and derivatives) comes with a banking application with
support for ~20 different bank backends.

The project community seems to be mostly french, so there is some
country-level bias in the range of supported banks. But adding modules
for other banks is not hard, it requires writing some mechanize code in
Python.

The banking API is not particularly sophisticated, but it's good enough
to automatically extract transaction lists in CSV format, that you can
then easily feed into other applications. I'm using it, targeting
Ledger-CLI, for both personal accounting and a small non-profit
association. And I'm quite pleased with the result.  The main problem in
scaling up this approach is that, at the end of the day, it is still web
scraping. The project community is doing wonders to give users a smooth
user experience (including a signed mechanism to get timely backend
updates), but it still feels shaky as a basis for anything enterprise-y.

Cheers.
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli  . . . . . . .  zack at upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
Former Debian Project Leader  . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o .
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