shared bank download/reconciliation API

[Daniel Bos]

On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 01:01:12PM -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
> 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.
> 

I believe LedgerHub [1] is an attempt to create a more generic solution for
transforming a wide variety of input formats into formats that can be
imported by various accounting programs.

At the moment it's geared toward ledger-cli like implementations, but
IIRC, the author has expressed interest in supporting more output formats.
(@Martin, correct me if i'm wrong)

[1] http://furius.ca/ledgerhub/

-- 
Best regards,
Daniel Bos

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