alt Hacker NewsNice project! I built a CLI budgeting project a long time ago, and what made me stop using my own project was the lack of automated integration with my bank accounts. At that point I had many credit cards, multiple bank accounts, in different currencies, and integrating all expenses was just too much manual work.
I wish financial institutions were better at automated exports of your financial data, given the right permissions of course.
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agos • today at 1:06 PM
it's very sad that in Europe we have laws to guarantee "open banking" but in practice it's only B2B
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That’s a fair point. Automated bank imports sound essential at first, especially with many accounts and cards.
In practice, though, I found them less useful for budgeting than expected. A bank statement tells you how much was spent and where, but not what the expense actually was. “$100 at a supermarket” could be groceries, pet food, a lawn mower, or business expenses — that context is what makes budgeting meaningful, and it usually has to be added manually anyway.
At that point, entering the expense directly with the right category often turned out to be simpler and more accurate for me. Automated access would still be nice for reconciliation, but it’s not the silver bullet it’s often perceived to be.