[Akashic101]

Firefly kinda worked around this. You can download all transactions of your bank as a CSV, then use the Firefly importer to automatically map the data and save it inside Firefly. I usually do this once a week and it works pretty quickly, maybe a minute of work.

[noeontheend]

This certainly works well if you only need to track one account, but my finances aren't even _that_ complicated and I still have accounts I try to keep up to date with five different banks (hometown bank with checking/savings, two credit cards, employer-sponsored retirement account with Fidelity, and a three-fund portfolio with Vanguard). All of those accounts have 2FA, so logging into each one, navigating to the download screen, and downloading it into the right spot easily adds up to fifteen minutes of work.

Ironically, I've found that since I started to rely more on downloading the CSVs and importing them (as opposed to entering everything by hand), I've been entering things less regularly because of the increased start up time. If each account just had an API to pull transactions, I could schedule a job to download everything daily and life would be so much better.

[jonpurdy]

I was looking into getting a virtual accountant to log into my few accounts, download CSVs, import and reconcile. But like you said, the most annoying thing about this is logging in, waiting for dumb SMS-based 2FA, selecting date range, logging into a different browser since Safari isn't supported properly, etc etc.

I'm unsure if providing the virtual accountant bank credentials is more or less secure than Plaid/Yodlee, but this is a major pain point.

[beej71]

It takes me more than a minute just to download CSV transactions from one source. I have 10 sources of data. :)

I'm only using it for tracking, not budgeting, so I do it maybe every 1-2 months.

[wintermutestwin]

>You can download all transactions of your bank as a CSV

Unless you have an Apple Card. I went to download last year's transactions and found out that they only allow you to download a PDF statement for each month!

[marcellus23]

That’s not true. You can export transactions in a variety of formats, including CSV, the button is right below the button to export a PDF.

[gkbrk]

Apple isn't known for inter-operating well with anything.