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>.