About 20 years ago I inherited enough money to retire on for the rest of my life. But the only evidence of those assets was, a dot matrix printout that anyone could have done in five minutes. So over the next few weeks, I created accounts in the various share registries and online banking websites, and manually cross-checked the printed list against those accounts. All was good, but I wanted to do that on a regular basis, and it was clear that doing it manually, on a regular basis, was not gonna happen.

I am personally -- NSFW SPOILER ALERT!! -- a long time Windows/IE user, and I knew that IE has a comprehensive automation interface. In literally a few lines of VBScript (say), you can programatically start IE, navigate to URLs, parse the DOM, create new local documents, and so on. But although those interfaces are very simple, they're not robust against failures, and have various weird and wonderful corner cases that will sometimes trip you up.

So over the next 10 years or so, I created a robust, general-purpose IE automation wrapper, and wrote some applications on top thereof. The result is that at any time, I can click a few buttons on a handsome user interface, and enter a single master password, at which point my application will automatically log into each share registry and online banking website in turn; download all new and amended data therefrom; transform all data into common formats; store it in a local cache, so it doesn't matter if it later disappears from the website; then creates a single share holdings document, showing all share holdings from all share registries, and a single online banking document, showing all transactions from all accounts at all banks since the start of time. Both documents have dynamic, user-defined sorting and filtering. They also hilite significant changes; check all share holdings against banking credits to confirm that all expected dividends were received; and so on.

In other words, I've completely automated various important financial checks that I simply couldn't do by hand on a regular basis. The downside is, I'm tied to IE - and - several hundred thousand lines of VBScript! If anyone would like to re-write all that code for Chrome or whatever - for free - you're more than welcome to contact me!!!