It never seems like any of these opensource accounting solutions have bank feeds? Why would anyone manually import bank info when an automatic feed exists.
My understanding is that automatic import through a third party cost a small fortune.
YNAB promoted not having it, as a feature. They claimed it would make you more responsible by taking 30 seconds after every purchase to open the app and add the purchase. Then they went from a one time fee ($30) to SaaS and began charging $100 + VAT a year, with automatic bank import being the only new feature. Either they are making bank, or it's insanely expensive.
Banks don't give out access to this API easily. Unfortunately it's not some OAuth thing that a new upstart accounting software could easily hook into, therefore the banks gate keep feeds to major accounting providers and no doubt charge excessively for the privelage. We need regulation to open feeds to anyone willing to consume them, or a bank to add it as a feature but why would they when they can charge Xero and MYOB to access proprietary feeds
Banks don’t all offer API access in the USA. It’s getting better but can still be a mess of needing to use Plaid, Yodlee, screen scraping, etc… for bank data access.
Back in the day bank feeds were horrific to develop but these days I think there are aggregate feed services. Seems like you could just implement support for one of those?
Even Plaid regularly fails to sync and they still rely on screen scraping for many banks. It might get better though, with the CFBP open banking initiative.
I haven't used it, but the team (person?) that makes Buckets (https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com) makes SimpleFIN (https://www.simplefin.org), which seems like it exposes exactly what you want: simple transaction data from arbitrary banks.
Plaid offers transactions APIs (https://plaid.com/products/transactions/), but I guess to your point these APIs are geared towards fintech companies, not personal use.
EDIT: I don't know how well it works in general, though. You'd have to test it yourself.
I'm currently writing a library that implements SimpleFIN. While the main website hasn't been updated in a while (even the demo endpoints are out of date, and I've written to the maintainer last month about it[1]), the demo endpoint described on the Simplefin Bridge the docs still works[2] so hopefully there's still movement.
They probably don’t want to deal with individual subscribers but if enough open source users wanted feeds you’d create a niche for a SaaS that does nothing but provide bank feeds for a few bucks a month. That’s the kind of micro SaaS one person could run.
There are some things that are “natural SaaS” and interoperability with ugly services run by huge banks that are probably moving targets and probably have administrative overhead to use is one example.
This seems to be exactly what the creator of SimpleFIN is doing with their "SimpleFIN bridge". Pay a small price and you can use the simplefin API to access any banks that they've supported so far.
Fintable offers the service but it only interfaces with Airtable. You can easily download a csv from there, or use the Airtable API. It's not for those who don't want their data in the cloud, but I've found the service to be pretty good.
