[dgrin91]

Honestly my biggest pain point with all personal accounting systems was that there was no easy, free way to automatically pull my transaction data from all my accounts into a single, local file that I can play with as I want. I really don't want to go to all my accounts every month and click download.

There still isn't, but I did recently find simplefin(https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/). Its not great (e.g. quota of only ~25 requests per day), but its good enough and the price was cheap enough that I just bit the bullet. It also paired well with Actual budget, and now I have a personal accounting system that I am reasonably happy with.

I also found teller.io, which is frankly a better dev experience (and good free tier!), but they don't support all the banks I'm on and somehow simplefin does.

[tracker1]

It would be nice if financial institutions simply created end-user/app centric APIs for consumption... As it is, the best you can do is something akin to puppeteer with a real browser agent and your authentication credentials and scraping... I mean there can be APIs underneath, but there's not a good open resource/repository that I'm aware of...

Would be nice/interesting to see something like that come about, but It's a bit frustrating. A delegated read-only api key against a specific account shouldn't be that hard to do.

[yehoshuapw]

I've slowly built up a set of scripts to do this: too many different methods, but eventually I get csv files for each account, then hledger import - and finally I manually fix up details