Connect Bank Accounts - transactions automatically imported

Yes I agree too, It will be great to have that feature.
Regards

Dear @lubos

Do have any feedback regarding OFX Direct or even PSD2, that would allow Manager to support bank feeds?

The issue is that none of the banks in Australia support OFX Direct as far as I know.

I don’t mind implementing this but I will need access to some OFX Direct endpoint. If you can help with that, feel free to email me to lubos@manager.io

what does “access to some OFX Direct endpoint” mean to us guys who are not techies? i need to understand to determine if there is anything i could do that would help this effort.

I guess, to design and test a software feature the programmer is going to need access to a Bank feed which uses OFX. As the programmer is in Australia where apparently no banks use this method he would need access to an overseas bank feed, probably from a resident in a country where a bank uses that communication method.

There are over 300 organisations which support this format. Probably worth checking if Citibank in Australia does

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I came to conclusion that OFX is probably dead protocol.

Bank feeds are typically facilitated by screen scrapping which is not clean way but it works without asking bank to support anything.

WaveAccounting provides bank feeds by paying 3rd-party bank aggregator Yodlee. You can see how unsustainable it is when someone is paying for your bank feeds. There are also security implications where you have to share your banking credentials with Yodlee - which is certainly against your bank rules.

The only way to have free bank feeds which work with all the banks is to simply use web-browser automation tool which will do clicking on your behalf.

I just released such a tool which can assist to download bank statement from online banking site and upload it to Manager in automated way. You have to write macro to obtain bank statement from your bank but once macro is written, it will save a lot of time.

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Hi Lubos, direct bank feeds are available now from all major banks without a third party like Yodlee. Can you work out if it is possible now to integrate in Manager. I use MAC, so web browser automation is also difficult. You can make it available for anybody who is willing to pay extra fee.

Perhaps in your country. In many, they are not available. In fact, in quite a few, downloaded statements are not even available.

Can you make it available for those who want to pay extra for this facility?

Is there a standard all these major banks follow?

Dear @Sunny

Please give feedback on the last post of @lubos:

Blockquote [quote=“Sunny, post:21, topic:11715”]
direct bank feeds are available now from all major banks without a third party like Yodlee
[/quote]

Is there a standard all these major banks follow?> Blockquote

No, there is no worldwide standard

No idea regarding any standards. I have been using a cloud version of Manager for more than five years now in Australia. My experience has been great till now but there are two major shortcomings in this software as I am a MAC user. (1) Non availability of direct bank feeds - I feel it can be managed by you especially for paid clients. It is a real pain to download the statements manually every other day to keep a track of the payments.I am ready to pay more if I get that facility. (2) Non availability of STP - you can integrate it with free softwares like Payroller which are so easy to work with. I can stay with Manager forever, if you can offer Direct Bank feeds for easy customer usability. Thanks.

Just thought I will add this to the mix. ANZ Bank in New Zealand offer connection to the following “out of the box”. Maybe be similar to AU as it is a Australian owned bank?

Dear @lubos

Do you perhaps have a solution to the error message I receive when trying to use Web Macro Player or is there another option to use?

Thanking you

  1. This should be in a new topic
  2. No one can help if all you can say is I have a problem, can you help?

You need to say what version you are using, what you are trying to do and show screen images of the error you are getting

@Meester I didn’t have time to maintain this project so I pulled it out. As a replacement, https://www.apify.com is very good. But it’s cloud hosted so there could be security concern although if your bank offers read-only credentials, then using cloud hosted scrapping tool could work fine.

But I still think developing your own bank scrapping script is high-effort solution.

The best approach is to implement support for standards such as open banking. I will be looking into this again sometime next month.

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Currently the Commonwealth Bank of Australia only offer bank feeds to Xero and MYOB

I like how you think, having this as part of manager because it would be an additional cost with 0 benefit for users who don’t want this feature.

Maybe if you provide some kind of way to have this as an add-on and not as an integral part.

What’s even better is to give users a built-in tool to write their own macros in a native console and have add-ons be ready made macros. That would be sweet :kissing_heart::ok_hand:

I created a set of two tools based on CBI (https://www.cbiglobe.com). I get both the bank balances and Receipts and Payments. However I had to use my main bank to get the records I need.

  1. My main bank (SS) is connected to CBI (I currently manage something like 20 bank accounts in my business),
  2. SS gets all I need and generates an excel file that through a plugin is saved automatically on my server.
  3. I open a different excel file that it is connected to my bank excel file and that do all the reclassification Manager needs for batch creation
  4. I make a backup of my business and I batch create everything.

This together with the other tool for automatic creation of all the accountings for loan amortization calculations saves me two/three days of work each month and also grants my company from a lot of possible errors due to manual data entry.