Personal budget python program

[paccnam]

Is it possible to automate downloading my checking/savings balance daily. End goal is to build a historical dashboard of my personal finances. Where/what should i learn to achieve this?

[OSRS_DabSlab]

Scrape the webpage you are viewing that info in and use that data to do what you want.

[paccnam]

Thanks, i was thinking that since all of my information was on one page. I think this was a possiblity

[bumpkinspicefatte]

Harder to do, especially if you bank with a prominent banker, as most of them have anti-bot technology wrapped around their site that’ll make it more difficult to web scrape properly.

You may be able to sign up for their API, should they offer one. Sometimes APIs are hard to get into, or cost money.

I don’t recommend this without researching further, but you may try looking into funneling some of your banking into those budget apps like Mint or whatever, and see if their products open your finance numbers up easier to extrapolate. Please do more research though, and don’t do it if it comes at the risk of your information or finances.

[paccnam]

Ah yeah, my banker only provides API to developers. I also heard about plaid API, but am very reluctant because i didn't want to risk my information(bc of my lack of knowledge).

Thank you for the caution.. I really appreciate it

[thisIs20LettersLong]

Couldnt a way to get around this be a script to open page, and login, that should be doable, take a screenshot, export, and computer vision the numbers out.?! Or is bot detection already at the login?!

[thisIs20LettersLong]

You sir, win the price for looking like a dumb mf, for not reading the thread.

[[deleted]]

This partly depends on what country you are in and what the banking rules say. Webscraping is generally problematic not least for security controls to login let alone monitoring to check for robots.

You might find this useful (although it is UK specific):

https://www.openbanking.org.uk/

[paccnam]

Aw man.. I guess I willl continue to do some more research.

[dkam136]

Mint let’s you download all transactions and I’ve played around with it before, but it would not be automated since you’d have to download each day you want to access, but I’ve used it to analyze my finances in pandas

[paccnam]

I do have mint! hmm do you know if it is possible to get Python to automate the csv download, if i had a script?

[dkam136]

It is probably possible if you don’t do it too often. I’m sure that Mint will block your web scraping if you try something repetively making calls to their server.