> As an engineer, it is in my DNA to build things. However, it’s too easy to get stuck in the mindset that you have to build everything. This mentality often leads one stuck with a plethora of incomplete products that grew too complex to finish before losing interest.<p>This. I can relate so much. I feel my instinct is always to roll-my-own because I can and, perhaps more importantly, because I'm not familiar with relevant no-code services.<p>What other such tools/services are out there that can help "to go from idea to proof-of-concept in only a few hours."?
For anyone who wants to do things like double-entry accounting with transaction splits (e.g., properly encode an Amazon order for 5 different items from different expense categories, that're paid for by a mix of rewards points, Gift Card balance, and CC), there's GnuCash.<p>You can also do things like record transactions yourself, update with downloaded data, and reconcile against monthly statements (as another way of catching discrepancies).<p>You can make custom reports with charts. I used these, for example, for comparing how much I spent buying coffee every day, vs. how much I spent on every cost that goes into making coffee at home, when I tried that for a while.<p>There's also features for tracking investments, including automatic updates of market prices.<p>And, if you're a small business, you can build and generate invoices (including building the invoice over multiple days), and track accounts receivable.<p>Warning: GnuCash can be a significant investment of time. I eventually decided it was no longer worth it for me, though I might someday resume it.<p>Other Warning: If you have retirement accounts or other investments in GnuCash, consider hiding them from view, which GnuCash lets you do with any account. Bogleheads-style, US people probably want to keep contributing to a predetermined balance of total-market stocks and bonds, automatically, and not think about it, especially when there's market fluctuations.
I admire how you've managed to do this easily (and avoid writing code for everything). But the fact that you have to do it shows how broken and lethargic banks have become.<p>In the UK, they are starting to wake up. The new "challenger" banks which exist here all do this as a hygiene feature - see Monzo, Starling, Revolut. With Open Banking mandating open APIs for all banks, this will become the norm soon. The fact that American banks and regulation hasn't jumped on this is a symptom of something very wrong with the system.<p>I sincerely hope the launch of Apple Card or similar services disrupt consumer finance in the US as well and set a new bar. And when the above mentioned banks come to the US (which they are currently working on), you should absolutely switch and delete the 100 lines of python as well.
Hi, sorry for a bit of off-topic but perhaps someone could tell me if I'm wrong here. I clicked on this article on medium.com and it shows me a dialog from Google asking if I want to continue browsing medium.com authenticated with my Google account. It shows there my name and e-mail address.
I find it a bit concerning. Can medium.com technically walk through the DOM of that page to harvest my personal data such as e-mail address and send it to medium.com with some API call?
I guess it must be filled by some .js code linked from google domains. Scary to see my e-mail address appear on random web page I entered.
The brilliance of this is the use of email receipts as the data source. There's so many services that use Yodlee (and/or the the Quicken-style "direct connect" method) to fetch your transactions but they all eventually fall over:<p>- your credentials change<p>- your credentials require MFA authentication<p>- your credentials require a password reset or security question/answer intervention<p>- the bank, Yodlee, or the service lose track of the transaction offset and you get duplicate transactions or missing transactions<p>- the service doesn't transmit all available metadata
I've done something similar recently; but instead of grabbing data from my bank, I chose to enter data manually from receipts.<p>This makes it work for both cash and debit payments, and doesn't need any maintenance for API breakage. I find doing this data entry calming, to be honest.<p>I wrote about it here <a href="https://gkbrk.com/2019/04/plaintext-budgeting/" rel="nofollow">https://gkbrk.com/2019/04/plaintext-budgeting/</a>
Very cool. Using email notifications to get transaction data is a nice hack. If you do find yourself wanting a more formal API, check out Plaid (<a href="https://plaid.com/" rel="nofollow">https://plaid.com/</a>). I've never used it myself, but I believe the free plan is enough to get your personal transactions.
Just a nitpick, but the word you’re looking for is discretionary. :)<p>We would all do well to follow this example though - NIH and reinventing the wheel are huge problems in our profession. Great work!
But this way you send all your financial transactions through at least 2 additional providers (zapier and google) and your email provider. Not sure if this is worth it.
An easy way to take this to the next level (and be truly no-code) is: <a href="https://www.tillerhq.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.tillerhq.com/</a><p>I love being able to continue using Google Sheets shortcuts + automation features. It allows me to generate well-formed reports that I can analyze with pivot tables or any of my normal processes that I use for analyzing datasets.
I'd like the capabilities of Mint without the creds hand off. BofA has starting doing this in their portal but it's not well done.<p>I like the "hack" here - seems BofA supports this kind of alert too. I'd love to follow a simple guide that lets me (1) setup the zapier instance and (2) deploy the server side to a DO or Heroku.
Very creative. Love the idea of using gsheets as the back-end so you can leverage the power of spreadsheets (which were basically designed for use cases like aggregating transactions!)
I have been wanting to do this, as I set up the Chase email notifications, but never got motivated to tackle what you used zapier for.<p>One thing that it seems you could do is use Google sheets for your constants vs coded in the repo. That way if you spend from somewhere new, you can do add that category on the fly by updating your sheet.
Your idea is very nice! I’m going to try it but without the use of zapier, instead I’m going to use python’s smtpd lib to directly receive the emails and parse them. Thanks for sharing
>[email purchase notifications ] I suspect every single major card company or payment application has the same option.<p>Quick glance at my UK amex says nope