Hacker News Reader

Comment by jxjnskkzxxhx | Hacker News Reader

Banks in the UK allow to export transactions in many formats. Login, pick time range, download in ofx format. Why is this a pain?

View on HN

It makes it about them not about you. I don't care which banks and other financial providers I use. I care about managing my funds in a way that is efficient and healthy for my life. The banks I use are simply service providers, a subclass of service providers across all the dimensions of my life. They have regulations they must abide by but in so doing they attempt to force me to think and act in those terms and I think they're poor.

The fact that I can download my data describing my transactions in a format convenient to me, makes it about them? Curious take.

You're justified in writing that mine is a weird (I know you wrote curious but I'll go further) take. I expanded my thinking beyond the scope you referenced but at least in part, yes. I have to log in to their interface, figure out and drill into where they offer that download. I don't want their branding and I don't want to manage my money in the way they constrain me to. I don't really want multiple accounts or to play interest maximization games by acting fiddley for example. At the highest level, I think about my flows in percentage allocations. 10% for charity, 10% for my kid's college (until there was enough), 10% for savings, so forth. As presented I'm constantly fiddling with specific money amounts for automation and stuck in the ledger rather than with sources and sinks with tagging based allocation and management policies. I'm ignoring the horsecrap around the ways they bilk the poor which is a separate kind of evil.

"banks allowing export of transactions" is only the start.

I deal with two banks for credit cards.

One (call it "Blue Bank") allows me to download a statement. I filter out a couple of things (payments mostly), check that it matches the paper statement balance, and post it. About 15 minutes start to finish.

The other (call it "Orange Bank") allows me to download a "statement". I filter out a couple of things (payments mostly), check my previous month's transactions to see which ones at the beginning of the file actually go in the current billing period (not already paid), stare at the last transactions to see which ones actually were posted to the current billing period (not after the cutoff), run the script to check the total (nope, doesn't match) then do that a couple of times until it matches. The time they changed the meaning of the "credit" column from "just confirming this is a credit" to "it's a credit, you need to flip the sign" it was 45 minutes.

But hey, it's all CSV!

I guess you must have a more complex life than me. I never filter out anything, and everything always matches.

Maybe. What I was trying to get at was, some banks (the 'orange one') don't provide sane semantics, so even if the input format is compatible, reconciliation can be a nightmare. You may not be dealing with your 'orange bank'; if I only dealt with the blue one I would not be aware of the problems of the other (and it would not have occurred to me that the orange one could botch it up).

Multiple bank accounts and multiple credit cards. Also, figuring out the time range for each bank.

I run into the same issues here with banks in the US. It is a real pain in the ass, and makes tracking this sort of information way more time consuming then it needs to be.

My other issue is with stores like Costco that sell both household goods, groceries, clothes, and even misc kids stuff. I like to track each separately. Which means I then need to fetch and analyze the receipts.

> I like to track each separately. Which means I then need to fetch and analyze the receipts.

That is a reality. To make my life easier, when I check out at a store, I put all my grocery items first on the belt. Then everything else. Usually "everything else" is only a few items. So I categorize those additional items, and then specify "Groceries" for the rest.

Often I buy only groceries, and I throw those receipts away. When I'm in a ledger/beancount session, if I don't have a receipt, that means it was just Groceries.

This method alone really reduced my time dealing with receipts.

For planning purposes, could you look at a year's postings, then come up with "good enough" breakout allocations going forward?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com