Call for Testers: HBCI in GnuCash
Christian Stimming
stimming@tuhh.de
Mon, 28 Oct 2002 12:03:13 +0100
The beta release GnuCash 1.7.2 features HBCI online banking support.
This makes it the world's first *free* HBCI-enabled personal finance
manager.
HBCI (Home Banking Computer Interface) is a standard used by German
banks for offering online banking service. Through this standard,
business actions like statement retrieval, bank transfer, or direct
debits can be invoked by any HBCI-compliant client application, i.e. now
also from GnuCash. Authentification and encryption is done through a
bank-issued chip card or a self-generated file-based RSA key pair. (In
the latter case, the user prints out his public key finger print on
paper, signs it, and sends it to his bank.)
Requirements
------------
OpenHBCI 0.9.3 (or current OpenHBCI CVS)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/openhbci
which in turn requires:
Libchipcard 0.6, http://sourceforge.net/projects/libchipcard
and OpenSSL any 0.9.x, http://www.openssl.org
Then you can build GnuCash 1.7.2 with:
./configure --enable-hbci --with-openhbci-prefix=/your/openhbci/prefix
And you need to apply at your Bank to get HBCI access. The bank will
provide you with some paper work which is needed during HBCI setup in
GnuCash.
Quick Tour
----------
HBCI support is accessible through a few new menu items:
* Setup: In the main window with the account hierarchy, the "Tools" menu
(German: "Werkzeuge") now contains the item "HBCI Setup" ("HBCI
Einrichtung"). This menu item opens the HBCI Setup druid which will
guide you through the setup.
- Chip card users will need to run this only once (even though I
haven't tested chip cards myself so far, so please don't hesitate to
send feedback)
- Users with self-generated file-based keys need to run this for the
first time to generate their keys and have their Ini-Letter printed,
which they need to send to their bank. After some days when the bank
has processed that letter, they need to run the HBCI Setup druid
a second time.
- Either way, eventually you are presented with a list of
HBCI-accessible accounts, and can choose which of your gnucash
account should be matched with each HBCI account.
* Account functions: In the register window of your GnuCash accounts,
you now find the submenu item "Online Actions" ("Online Aktionen") in
the menu "Actions" ("Aktionen"). Each item in this submenu invokes a
particular HBCI action: "Get Balance", "Get Transactions", "New
Transfer", "New Direct Debit" ("Abfrage Saldo", "Abfrage Kontoumsätze",
"Neue Überweisung", "Neue Lastschrift"). Of course those menu items will
only do anything if that particular GnuCash account was matched to a
HBCI account in the setup druid; otherwise, simply nothing will happen.
How to perform each action will be explained in the respective
dialog windows.
* Preference: By default, the user has to enter his password/PIN each
time a HBCI action is performed. If you prefer to have your password
cached in memory during your gnucash session, you can enable this by
activating the appropriate button in the Edit->Preference dialog
("Bearbeiten->Einstellungen") in the tab "Online Banking & Importing".
Of course the password/PIN is *never ever* stored on disk anywhere.
Known Banks
-----------
OpenHBCI/Gnucash is successfully being used with:
- Deutsche Bank
- Kreissparkasse Hannover
- Hamburger Sparkasse
- Sparkasse Wilhelmshaven
Call for Feedback
-----------------
If you encounter an error, don't hesitate to report it on
gnucash-devel@gnucash.org and on openhbci-general@lists.sf.net . Please
remember to include the version numbers of gnucash and openhbci as well
as any console output and/or HBCI connection log.
Also, if you managed to successfully setup a bank that we don't have in
our list yet, please let us know as well. We appreciate any feedback on
this new functionality.
Known Problems
--------------
* The transaction importing into the accounts isn't as sophisticated as
we eventually hope to implement it, but Benoit Grégoire
<bock@step.polymtl.ca> is still working on it.
* Currently each HBCI action can only be executed while you are online;
support for off-line preparation and queueing is not yet implemented.
If you think you can do better on any of these issues -- why not give it
a try and start coding on yet more HBCI features? Gnucash only requires
some C and Gtk/Gnome knowledge, and other developers in the IRC channel
#gnucash, irc.gnome.org, will always assist you with problems arising
during coding. You don't need to know anything about HBCI since OpenHBCI
will do everything for you. Also, I (Christian Stimming) will withdraw
from HBCI/Gnucash development due to personal/time constraints in the
medium term. So if you want more features, why don't *you* start coding
today? We definitely welcome any new developer who contributes even the
smallest improvements.
Credits
-------
The excellent OpenHBCI library is written by Fabian Kaiser
<fabian.kaiser@gmx.de>, Martin Preuss <openhbci@aquamaniac.de>, and
Christian Stimming <stimming@tuhh.de>. Libchipcard is written by Martin
Preuss <openhbci@aquamaniac.de>.