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0 pointsrendaw4y ago0 comments

I've been doing this for a couple years, just with Selenium rather than Puppeteer. Banks are generally okay, and they don't change their websites that often which is nice. A couple banks force phone 2FA and deliberately hide the "email confirmation" option which makes full automation difficult. Also nag screens, Selenium unreliability, etc.

Some companies like Azure use a different account name every time they bill me. I ended up having to regex the credit card transactions for that. Others have something completely nonsensical like "BS 03-6743-2266" (<- this was iTunes), or use a 3rd party processor that puts their own name in the transaction.

The real issue for me is getting itemized purchases to do categorization on. Stuff like restaurants are okay since everything is food, so I can just categorize the whole transaction. Amazon banned me and forced me to change my password while trying to grab my purchase history (and only my purchase history!). I was trying to grab it from email receipts but then I realized they don't send receipts for Subscribe & Save purchases (!).

I'd kill for something better, but for now it's this or manually enter every transaction or give up on financial responsibility.

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ncallaway4y ago

Yep, I haven't been able to get to full automation either.

I integrate with 1pw, so I don't have to enter my credentials which is nice.

I handle all the 2FA through cli prompts, so as a user you basically need to stick around as it's running because you might get a 2FA prompt as it logs in to banks.

The worst for me has been irregular marketing or other reminder popups from some banks. The kind of thing where they put some interstitial page up once per month or so after you sign in and want you to respond in some way.

scrollaway4y ago

You're doing this for personal or business expenses?

I'm curious to check this out, do you have a GitHub repo/account?

rendawOP4y ago

Personal, and no repo at the moment. The code is a huge mess, from scattered multiple generations of wrappers around Selenium's "click this element" functionality to custom accounting code to bit rotted parsers for old receipt email formats, etc. My thinking was largely "as long as I have the data I can make the code better later" and that later has yet to come. I don't have any passwords in the code at least but I think I do have email address whitelists/blacklists for email management stuff and lists of merchants for credit card transaction categorization...

I'll see if I can maybe make a repo by the next time there's a thread about how customer hostile banks are.

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