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Re:Show HN: ExpenseOwl – simple and beautiful self-hostedexp... by andrei_says_ on Friday February 07, 2025 @11:02PM (#42980265)
Wouldn’t importing a credit card statement eliminate the need for manual entries?

I don’t use an expense tracking tool - apologies if my question may is missing context.

Re:Show HN: ExpenseOwl – simple and beautiful self-hostedexp... by TechDebtDevin on Friday February 07, 2025 @11:45PM (#42980456)
Easier said then done. Most softwares Ive used that attempted this did so poorly. However it is getting better.
Re:Show HN: ExpenseOwl – simple and beautiful self-hostedexp... by aperrien on Saturday February 08, 2025 @02:46AM (#42981257)
Whatever happened to the Quick Interchange Format(.qif)? It used to be common for all banks to support that. A modern variant today could just be a XML or JSON export, and I hardly see that either.
Re:Show HN: ExpenseOwl – simple and beautiful self-hostedexp... by junon on Saturday February 08, 2025 @03:07AM (#42981341)
Most banks don't have an API, and statements are (often) lagged, sometimes even by a week or a month depending on how archaic the systems are.
Re:Show HN: ExpenseOwl – simple and beautiful self-hostedexp... by satvikpendem on Saturday February 08, 2025 @03:37AM (#42981477)
Lots of providers exist for bank information, Plaid is one of them. That's what many of these auto import personal finance softwares use.
Re:Show HN: ExpenseOwl – simple and beautiful self-hostedexp... by junon on Saturday February 08, 2025 @05:17AM (#42981939)
Having used Plaid, it is essentially web scraping as a service. It's an API built on top of very questionable access. It itself is not a formal API provided to you by the bank.
Re:Show HN: ExpenseOwl – simple and beautiful self-hostedexp... by satvikpendem on Saturday February 08, 2025 @05:19AM (#42981949)
Yes it is (I never said it wasn't), but it works. They are working with banks to modernize their APIs as well.
Re:Show HN: ExpenseOwl – simple and beautiful self-hostedexp... by jellyfishbeaver on Saturday February 08, 2025 @09:37AM (#42983200)
The Canadian government has apparently introduced a framework for sharing your banking data securely with third parties (budgeting apps, financial products) in an effort to eliminate this shady screen scraping and credential sharing that a lot of these kind of apps do. Hoping they actually follow through...

https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/...

Re:Show HN: ExpenseOwl – simple and beautiful self-hostedexp... by hexnuts on Sunday February 09, 2025 @03:47AM (#42989378)
Actual Finance (similar open source software) does this via SimpleFIN Bridge. It even supported connecting a credit card option that rocket money doesn't.
Re:Show HN: ExpenseOwl – simple and beautiful self-hostedexp... by RealStickman_ on Monday February 10, 2025 @11:39AM (#43002213)
I did that for a while, but I always spent a lot of time retracing my steps to properly label most transactions. I think I'll try the tool listed here, if it is simple enough to manually enter transactions I can do that every evening and get better data in the end than a monthly review.
Re:Show HN: ExpenseOwl – simple and beautiful self-hostedexp... by import-base64 on Monday February 10, 2025 @03:51PM (#43005004)
i agree, intention behind this project is - select a category add cost and done! no tags, no wallets, no budgets
Re:Show HN: ExpenseOwl – simple and beautiful self-hostedexp... by tomcam on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @03:41AM (#43010442)
How does one import credit card statements reliably in the USA?