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by civilized 1524 days ago
I'm excited about this because it may help with a problem I've had for many years: in a word, being my family's CFO.

I'm a data scientist, and I'd like to be able to report as easily on my own personal finances as I can on the data of the company I work for. This is not a small thing for me. I want to take care of my family's finances, but I'm impatient with bullshit. I don't want to spend an hour every weekend logging into 10 different services, clicking on 10 different things in each company's always-different, always-shitty web UI to pull all the data I need. The easier and more convenient this is to do, the better job I will do managing my money and protecting my family.

As a data scientist, I can handle writing a little code to make some API calls and crunch the numbers that come back. If APIs were available to me for all companies I have assets or liabilities with, I'd have no trouble being an awesome family CFO. But... there is nobody that wants to make this secure and easy for me!! I would have to go to a company like Personal Capital, give them ALL MY ACTUAL BANK LOGIN CREDENTIALS, and they'll go login and do some screen-scraping to get the data. Half the time that won't work because of 2FA complications. They'll bring that data into their little ecosystem, serve it through some shitty web interface, and use it to serve me whatever ad nonsense they want. It's immensely unpleasant, slow, unreliable, and insecure. It sucks ass.

Is your company going to fix this, or perhaps be one part of the solution? One day, will I be able to run my own R and Python scripts that pull all my data, balance my checkbook against receipt screenshots, automatic fraud detection, show me how all my investments are doing? Maybe even open-source it so that others can do the same?

Thank you so much, in advance, for reading and any reply you can make! I'm very excited for this!

3 comments

You might be interested in Tiller Money https://www.tillerhq.com/. They provide something very much along these lines, with the output being an auto-updating Google Sheet that you can do whatever you like with. You do still need to update credentials sometimes, but I've been using it for a few years and it works quite well.
I've never heard of this! I've seen millions of ads over the last few years, why haven't any of them been for this! I will check it out, thank you!
Do note that Tiller and Personal Capital both use(d?) the same mechanism to scrape data: Yodlee

https://www.yodlee.com/

Hey there, you will be able to do all of this with our Klutch credit card. Full disclaimer I am the cofounder. But what we built is exactly what you are describing. Here is a link to our documentation- https://dev.klutchcard.com/docs
I would set all accounts to send monthly/weekly statements and get PDF's that way into an email. Then all that is needed is a python downloader + scraper + visualizer based on how much automation you need.

I'd avoid using any service to do this for you after what PLAID pulled off on people by storing their credentials and getting more info than what was actually needed.