Dear Dave,
thanks for this interesting feature proposal. I would probably be one
potential developer who is able to work on this feature, but there are
some issues which make this rather complicated. I'll comment on each
below.
Zitat von "Dave (DavesTechShop.net)" <d...@davestechshop.net>:
My goal is to be able to get *all* my banking, loan and investment info into
GnuCash easily and *automatically*. (...)
I was recently looking at Wesabe.com and I tried their open source (GPL 2)
Firefox extension for downloading/uploading financial data. I love the
Wesabe approach, and I would like to see it adapted to GnuCash. It supports
more banks and it is both flexible and reasonably secure.
It seems that a Firefox extension for GnuCash with the Wesabe functionality
could result in a killer personal finance app.
Ok, after reading through the wesabe site I understand what sort of
information you are looking for. Your proposed "personal finance
management application" should download all available transaction and
balance information from all your banks as automatically as possible,
and display it somehow nicely. That's the "user experience" you're
looking for.
(I assume you are not expecting to be able to initiate money transfer
with your bank accounts through online banking.)
Technically, the difficulty of downloading depends on the download
methods which the bank servers implement. As you've seen on the wesabe
site already, a bank server either offers a special server called OFX
server, or it offers some web pages which somewhere have a "download"
link. In the former case, wesabe needs your OFX login data and does
everything automatically. In the latter case, the "Firefox uploader"
will locally "act like you" and access those web pages.
Let's see what gnucash can do for you:
With OFX server: In this case, the data download is already
implemented through the libaqbanking library. For the user experience
you are expecting, gnucash is still missing the "download everything
automatically" part, but this could indeed be implemeted with rather
small effort. Say, 3-5 person-days.
Without OFX server: In this case, you need something which "acts like
you" and access the web pages. However, something like the "Firefox
uploader" cannot be adapted to gnucash easily. Even though the
"Firefox uploader" is GPL, we cannot re-use its code because it is
AFAIK Javascript intended to be run in Firefox, whereas gnucash is
C/gtk and does not have an embedded Javascript parser. Hence, for
achieving this functionality inside gnucash, one would have to
re-write the same thing but for gnucash, which is a 12 person-months
task, aka impossible. What *might* work is to modify this Firefox
Add-On so that it writes the downloaded files somewhere on the
harddisk, and gnucash then loads and imports those files in a second
step. Creating such a "Bank Download Add-On" from the wesabe code base
might indeed be possible, but still requires something like 1
person-month of work. And these recorded download steps of course
always break down as soon as the bank changes its website, but I
assume this is a tolerable restriction which doesn't bother the wesabe
users too much.
As I wrote in the other message: In other countries of this world
(e.g. Germany), any "online banking" feature includes the possiblity
of initiating money transfers. For this reason, access to the online
banking information is intentionally more complicated (e.g. you enter
different numbers each time). As a side-effect, the approach of the
"Firefox Uploader" probably won't work for many (if not most) German
bank web sites, which is part of the reason why the wesabe service
sounds a bit weird for German users. But as this doesn't apply to you,
it doesn't have to bother your feature proposal.
In summary: I don't think it is realistically possible for gnucash to
download banking data from websites which do not offer a separate OFX
download server. On the other hand, for banks which do have OFX
download, the user experience in gnucash could still be simplified
significantly and this is probably not too difficult.
What do you think?
Regards,
Christian Stimming
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