this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
21 points (88.9% liked)

Selfhosted

40211 readers
878 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
ruud
Loki
CannaVet
devve
HybridSarcasm
[email protected]
21
Auto import transactions to financial manager by parsing bank emails–– a sanity check (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/selfhosted
3 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I've been after that golden goose of auto-imported transactions from my US banks into a selfhosted financial manager for some time now. Plaid doesn't work with some of my banks, and comes with a slew of privacy compromises anyway. I'm looking to import transactions into firefly iii (or actualbudget) by scraping information from bank alert emails about my transactions. I wanted to write about it here in case someone had experience doing so or any tips-- or if this is a silly venture.

My plan is to set alerts for all transactions across my banks, and direct them all to a single email address. Then I'll write a python script that checks the inbox every 5mins or so, and if it detects a new email, it will parse it according to some code I write and extract the amount and the payee, and then attempt to import it into (in this case, ActualBudget) using the importTransactions API call.

It's going to be a bit of a pain in the ass to set this up as I see it (I'm also a bit of a beginner, but think I can make it work) and I just want to see if anyone else has tried this. Thanks!

top 3 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Swedishfish12 5 points 1 year ago

I’ve been after something like this as well. My bank only provides statements in PDF format which is pretty irritating. I’ve seen this library recommended for extracting tables from PDFs if you are dealing with that issue. I’m not sure if there is a great way to automatically download the statements though.

https://py-pdf-parser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/overview.html

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I know that banks in Europe are bound by law to follow PSD2, which is a set of guidelines to propose APIs. I found a stackoverflow post to generate the required certificates for that but those are only supposed to be for testing purposes https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50045376/how-to-create-eidas-certificate-with-qwac-and-qsealc-profiles-psd2-specific-att

You can use the PSD2 api to fetch the transactions from your account directly, that would be a lot less troublesome. There is also the woob (formerly weboob) project that has web scraping for a lot of banks (specifically french but also some American ones like amex)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I just went the parsing CSV route, but it's only semi-automated. Still a lot better than manually entering everything. Annoyingly, every bank uses a different damn format so you need specific config for all of them.