Money money money
I’ve been using iBank for a little while now to manage my finances. I really this app that rivals programs like Microsoft Money and Quicken. It’s full of features, and helps you manage your budgets, your bank accounts, and balance and consolidate spending against your bank statements.
iBank does integrate with my online banking by importing Quicken format data, which is great. However, I’ve been thinking about how it could be made a smoother process. I would love a situation where I can authorise iBank and then it will fetch my day or week’s statements and import them. I believe Money has a feature like this with some banks in the states.
I can think of a number of routes to achieving, this, obviously the least likely involving any kind of co-operation with the banks themselves. Realistically some kind of script is in order which can read the bank login page and authorise as me. However, I have a feeling that the online banks I use do some crazy authorisation stuff which would make using, say, Perl impossible.
This lead me to thinking about using something like Greasemonkey, or Selenium in Firefox. Since both these things operate inside a real browser they would authorise as I would. I am considering putting my online banking login info into keychain (on a keychain of it’s own) so that I can try out my crazy idea. In the morning when I get into work, the script would fire, ask me to authenticate it, and then open my banking web sites in a hidden Firefox instance to download all the data. After that it would lock the keychain again and import all the data into iBank for me.
If I get my crazy scheme working I may even look at building a webkit/cocoa app as an open source tool for other people to download and extend with more banks.
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