I wish it was easier to actually pull information from various banks and accounts. For all of mine, I have to log in to the website and click around some 2006 era website to set a range or dates or something before I can generate a CSV file. It's a ton of friction just to get a look at my financials. I wish I could always have access to updated CSV files without having to spend all this time for each and every account. The only alternative is paid services like mint, which I don't want. I just want my raw data so I can roll my own and come up with my own ways to manage my finances.
Excel[0] has this functionality built in via Plaid[1]. There are other solutions like YNAB[2] or Wealthfront[3]. I agree with you though. I have a nice python program for understanding my finances, but I still have to manually update bank/credit card/loan balances.
If you’re already writing Python, check out ofxtools [1]. Pretty easy to use, and csingley has done a great job modeling the OFX specs, complete with type hints!
Tiller user here. It’s a brilliant product. They have many different templates that allow you to manage money at the level of detail you want. I tried a ton of different apps and none of them were flexible enough.
My only complaint is that their Google Sheets sidebar UI can be abysmally slow at times, and you have to open it and hit “sync” to load transactions from your financial institutions.
Can I automate with their service? I don't care about their spreadsheet templates, I just want to have a CSV to play with in a local directory that I can update with a cron job.
Its been a while but yes you could at least use the sheet as your db intake, they might also have other, cleaner options, but it does pull it down on a regular basis automatically, you dont need to trigger each time.
I take this as a positive in my personal financial planning.
Basically the idea is that financial planning should be done primarily for the long term, and therefore the data does not need to be managed in real time. I manually pull all my account totals once a year, update my model, and make adjustments then. If there’s a significant event (example: onset of a global pandemic) I will do a special edition of this process.
To be clear, I’m contributing to investments through the year, but when doing so I’m following a strategy I check about once a year.
