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joehoyle / ultrafinance

https://ultrafinance.app/
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Bank Support - Ability to add new information #1

Open latetedemelon opened 1 year ago

latetedemelon commented 1 year ago

Hi @joehoyle, I ran across this and feel you may be on to something here. I'd love to get started but it appears you're mainly focused on European banks.

I think ideally the ability to slurp CSV, OBX via upload, local disk, or weblink would be useful for getting non-automated bank info.

Is there anyway we could get some North American (Canadian) banks? This might be a big ask as you might need to partner with a Plaid type entity. Or maybe Simplefin with their bank bridge? (https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org). The only other option I can think of is allowing users to build a webscraper with the functions part of the app.

Good luck, I've been looking for a consolidator for a while.

joehoyle commented 1 year ago

@latetedemelon thanks for reaching out!

I've been thinking of a couple ways to increase the surface area, as fundamentally the limiting factor I see with many finance apps is they use a single aggregator... which does not include all banks, so often you're then stuck missing 1-2 institutions. Ultrafinance is aiming to solve that issue so can't just fall into the same issue of being limited by what 1 aggregator (in this case, nordigen) provide integrations for.

I think adding support for multiple aggregators is a good way to go, to increase the surface area. I'd need to check T&Cs of things like Plaid and Nordigen though, as it's possible they require exclusivity to use their service.

I'd also like to add an escape hatch for "manual" bank accounts that can use the Functions to fetch transactions. Those functions could fetch from remote CSV etc. Such "bank account" types could also be used to fetch non-bank account transactions, like investment value, or even something like an Amazon account, whereby it would pull purchases as debit transactions (and then you'd categorize the Amazon payment in your actual bank account as a Transfer rather than Debit).

For manual upload, I think it's possible though I'd like to focus on workflows that can be automated. I know that's not possible in every case, but even if the upload needed to be out-of-band (like you upload it to your Dropbox) and then have a Function to check that fixed URL every day, that could achieve a similar thing.

IMO the next priority being a "manual" type account that you can slurp things into however you want via Functions would at least provide some categorically new capability that I will prioritize, over just adding support for more institutions via more aggregators.

Let me know you thoughts

latetedemelon commented 1 year ago

I'd agree that you get the most coverage that way (CSV upload). There are probably a lot of projects to get you started with CSV interpretation for financial transactions here as I think you're biggest hurddle will be the different formats.

However I don't think Nordigen covers any of North America. If you wanted automated downloads for any of those I think you'll need to look to Yodlee, MX, Plaid, Fincity etc. (Simplefin, uses MX but the users pay for the service).