I’ve been after that golden goose of auto-imported transactions from my US banks into a selfhosted financial manager for some time now. Plaid doesn’t work with some of my banks, and comes with a slew of privacy compromises anyway. I’m looking to import transactions into firefly iii (or actualbudget) by scraping information from bank alert emails about my transactions. I wanted to write about it here in case someone had experience doing so or any tips-- or if this is a silly venture.
My plan is to set alerts for all transactions across my banks, and direct them all to a single email address. Then I’ll write a python script that checks the inbox every 5mins or so, and if it detects a new email, it will parse it according to some code I write and extract the amount and the payee, and then attempt to import it into (in this case, ActualBudget) using the importTransactions API call.
It’s going to be a bit of a pain in the ass to set this up as I see it (I’m also a bit of a beginner, but think I can make it work) and I just want to see if anyone else has tried this. Thanks!
I know that banks in Europe are bound by law to follow PSD2, which is a set of guidelines to propose APIs. I found a stackoverflow post to generate the required certificates for that but those are only supposed to be for testing purposes https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50045376/how-to-create-eidas-certificate-with-qwac-and-qsealc-profiles-psd2-specific-att
You can use the PSD2 api to fetch the transactions from your account directly, that would be a lot less troublesome. There is also the woob (formerly weboob) project that has web scraping for a lot of banks (specifically french but also some American ones like amex)