Personal accounting management is a tedious task: logging in to each bank’s web portal, checking for new PDF documents to download, then downloading for each account a “computer-friendly” record of transactions since the previous visit. And this is only to get the data…
All banks seem to agree on using the PDF format for “official communication”. For files intended to be imported into accounting software, however, anything is possible: csv
, qif
, ofx
, or even nothing (that’s Oney…). Besides, the downloading process is not always satisfactory: the HTML forms to fill may be a bit buggy, the downloaded files sometimes have the wrong encoding, the included labels may not be as informative as those found on the web site…
Then I discovered boobank
, from the Weboob software collection. This awesome tool can automatically login to each bank, and then convert the web site’s paged list of transactions into a standard format, such as ofx
!