For awhile now, I've been crafting some software at home to keep track of my family's spending. I've tried Mint, Quicken, etc in the past, and none of them do it in exactly the way I'd like. They're either unreliable in connecting to my bank (Mint) or have an unfriendly user interface (Quicken). Personally, I'm after daily spending reports which are emailed out, a database of past transactions I can query easily, etc, etc.
Problem is, my current bank makes it a bit difficult to do this reliably. I manage to get my transactions today using Sikuli to log in to the account and download an OFX file, which is great. However, the OFX file itself often truncates the description of the transaction in such a way that you can't even tell who the money was paid to. It's pretty random in this way...for some vendors it prepends their address in the transaction description, for others, all it puts is their address. This may be the fault of the debit card/credit card processors themselves, not sure. Regardless, it is frustrating.
Plus, it shouldn't have to be this way. I'd really like to have a bank which:
- Provides some sort of API to get access to transactions, or at least makes it very easy to download transactions in an automated fashion
- Reliably marks transactions which go to a particular vendor
Any of you know a bank that does this, or does similar things to make a hacker's life easier?
For awhile now, I've been crafting some software at home to keep track of my family's spending. I've tried Mint, Quicken, etc in the past, and none of them do it in exactly the way I'd like. They're either unreliable in connecting to my bank (Mint) or have an unfriendly user interface (Quicken). Personally, I'm after daily spending reports which are emailed out, a database of past transactions I can query easily, etc, etc.
Problem is, my current bank makes it a bit difficult to do this reliably. I manage to get my transactions today using Sikuli to log in to the account and download an OFX file, which is great. However, the OFX file itself often truncates the description of the transaction in such a way that you can't even tell who the money was paid to. It's pretty random in this way...for some vendors it prepends their address in the transaction description, for others, all it puts is their address. This may be the fault of the debit card/credit card processors themselves, not sure. Regardless, it is frustrating.
Plus, it shouldn't have to be this way. I'd really like to have a bank which: - Provides some sort of API to get access to transactions, or at least makes it very easy to download transactions in an automated fashion - Reliably marks transactions which go to a particular vendor
Any of you know a bank that does this, or does similar things to make a hacker's life easier?
Thanks in advance.