Comment by paxys a day ago
> Wealthfolio does not currently support integration with online brokers or aggregators. Data must be imported from CSV files or by manually entering transactions.
This is unfortunately going to be the deal breaker for wide adoption. Self hosting is great, but manually importing data from dozens of accounts every day and entering every single transaction as you make it is simply too much of a burden.
This doesn't appear to be documented...
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awealthfolio.app+map+p...
Would be happy to contribute profiles.
Quicken is getting even more and more disappointing.
Used to be, you'd use what Quicken calls "direct connect" where the client software itself connects to your bank's servers and pulls down your transactions and balances. They also had this "quicken connect" where the client software connects to Quicken servers, who, in turn, contact your bank--making Intuit an unwanted middleman. Slowly, but consistently, Quicken has been dropping "direct connect" support and coercing their users to go the middleman route.
I, too, have been looking for an alternative to Quicken, but: 1. I don't want to have to go to each bank's crappy web site and download a crappy CSV to import, and 2. I also don't want the software developer inserting itself into what should be a data transfer between me and my bank.
The Holy Grail personal finance software would 1. be free and open source, 2. download data directly from financial institutions without CSVs or a middleman and 3. store the data in an open format like sqlite that I can query and manipulate outside of the application.
My understanding is that part of the problem is that many banks do not provide that kind of "direct connect" functionality anymore. Some used to provide OFX but no longer do. Also, financial regulations aimed at "open banking" (like PSD2) bizarrely seem oriented towards enabling middlemen like Plaid. They don't require anything like "each individual customer must be allowed to access their individual data by using an API however they want"; it all has to go through a "third-party provider".
So the holy grail is really "Banks must be required to provide all customer info in a machine-readable format, via a programmable API, directly to their customers." :-)
You're correct here. The banks have limited who they are allowing into their systems more and more right now. We wanted to build direct partnerships with trading institutions to leverage their brokerages but they'd tell us to speak with their whitelisted partners like Plaid or a new (YC backed) incumbent, Snaptrade.
If you can be a little flexible on (2), then Beancount hits most of the Holy Grail points. The ledger format is literally text (it is plain-text accounting after all) but there is a query language the works really well.
I end up saving CSV's locally and importing the transactions from there (no hand entry, but I still need the intermediate download step.) I don't find it that too burdensome since I don't have a zillion different accounts.
[This](https://reds-rants.netlify.app/personal-finance/the-five-min...) project (I am not affiliated in any way) claims to automate ledger update even further.
Yea, (2) is always the tough one. Looking at my Quicken, I have 28 active accounts that I regularly (like daily) update from online, and manually finding, downloading, importing, and reconciling 28 CSVs is just not going to be acceptable.
That said, I'll check out Beancount!
One possible option might be to set up email ingestion. My brokerage will send a daily update, for example. It's not super detailed, but it's a start.
Would it be possible to write an addon to use Perl's Finance::Quote [1] like GnuCash does? It supports scraping many financial websites, as well as paid AlphaVantage quotes.
Agreed, they should at least support Plaid to get your account information and pull it in locally.
No, the ability to import is table stakes for me. I'm not manually entering transactions or trades. Simply providing an API key for me and vibe coding a client to pull is all that's needed.
Unfortunately ETRADE for example does not make exporting all transaction easy. Last time I looked at their API it involved manually authing via a http flow signing into your ETRADE account to get a temporary token that expires. Not exactly a flow that can be used for long polling account activity.
I haven't researched much on Robinhood or Coinbase but I suspect they have much better APIs. That's an idea where a plugin system would be awesome, something like Plaid but for brokerages and Crypto exchanges only.
If there was a sufficiently good import, something deeply customized for at least the top N banks, I think I’d be ok with that workflow. But even Quicken was disappointing on that front.