bounty for online banking idea for GnuCash

[Christian Stimming]

Dear Dave,

thanks for this interesting feature proposal. I would probably be one  
potential developer who is able to work on this feature, but there are  
some issues which make this rather complicated. I'll comment on each  
below.

Zitat von "Dave (DavesTechShop.net)" <dave at davestechshop.net>:
> My goal is to be able to get *all* my banking, loan and investment info into
> GnuCash easily and *automatically*. (...)
> I was recently looking at Wesabe.com and I tried their open source (GPL 2)
> Firefox extension for downloading/uploading financial data. I love the
> Wesabe approach, and I would like to see it adapted to GnuCash. It supports
> more banks and it is both flexible and reasonably secure.
>
> It seems that a Firefox extension for GnuCash with the Wesabe functionality
> could result in a killer personal finance app.

Ok, after reading through the wesabe site I understand what sort of  
information you are looking for. Your proposed "personal finance  
management application" should download all available transaction and  
balance information from all your banks as automatically as possible,  
and display it somehow nicely. That's the "user experience" you're  
looking for.

(I assume you are not expecting to be able to initiate money transfer  
with your bank accounts through online banking.)

Technically, the difficulty of downloading depends on the download  
methods which the bank servers implement. As you've seen on the wesabe  
site already, a bank server either offers a special server called OFX  
server, or it offers some web pages which somewhere have a "download"  
link. In the former case, wesabe needs your OFX login data and does  
everything automatically. In the latter case, the "Firefox uploader"  
will locally "act like you" and access those web pages.

Let's see what gnucash can do for you:

With OFX server: In this case, the data download is already  
implemented through the libaqbanking library. For the user experience  
you are expecting, gnucash is still missing the "download everything  
automatically" part, but this could indeed be implemeted with rather  
small effort. Say, 3-5 person-days.

Without OFX server: In this case, you need something which "acts like  
you" and access the web pages. However, something like the "Firefox  
uploader" cannot be adapted to gnucash easily. Even though the  
"Firefox uploader" is GPL, we cannot re-use its code because it is  
AFAIK Javascript intended to be run in Firefox, whereas gnucash is  
C/gtk and does not have an embedded Javascript parser. Hence, for  
achieving this functionality inside gnucash, one would have to  
re-write the same thing but for gnucash, which is a 12 person-months  
task, aka impossible. What *might* work is to modify this Firefox  
Add-On so that it writes the downloaded files somewhere on the  
harddisk, and gnucash then loads and imports those files in a second  
step. Creating such a "Bank Download Add-On" from the wesabe code base  
might indeed be possible, but still requires something like 1  
person-month of work. And these recorded download steps of course  
always break down as soon as the bank changes its website, but I  
assume this is a tolerable restriction which doesn't bother the wesabe  
users too much.

As I wrote in the other message: In other countries of this world  
(e.g. Germany), any "online banking" feature includes the possiblity  
of initiating money transfers. For this reason, access to the online  
banking information is intentionally more complicated (e.g. you enter  
different numbers each time). As a side-effect, the approach of the  
"Firefox Uploader" probably won't work for many (if not most) German  
bank web sites, which is part of the reason why the wesabe service  
sounds a bit weird for German users. But as this doesn't apply to you,  
it doesn't have to bother your feature proposal.

In summary: I don't think it is realistically possible for gnucash to  
download banking data from websites which do not offer a separate OFX  
download server. On the other hand, for banks which do have OFX  
download, the user experience in gnucash could still be simplified  
significantly and this is probably not too difficult.

What do you think?

Regards,

Christian Stimming