Import files

[lmb]

On 2001-10-30T15:20:10,
   Linas Vepstas <linas@linas.org> said:

> > In the same vain, has anyone looked at adding HBCI support to gnucash for
> > direct support of German (and other countries too?) home banking? How much
> > effort would that be?
> Well, I think the gnucash programming interface is fairly clean -- you 
> create a transaction, set the date, set the amount, etc.  So the only
> hard part is to open, read & parse your favorite format. 

Well, HBCI is much more than that.

It allows one to do all you would want to do; ask the bank for account
information, transactions, do money transfers, request new forms, whatever, in
a standarized and open way; however, the specification is still pretty
complicated, the connection requires encryption/signatures via a chipcard et
all.

Though initally, I would be quite happy if it just did download the
transactions from my bank and import that... ;-)

While the good and proper implementation would be to go with HBCI, I fear the
easy and tempting way is a set of perl scripts to automate the https dialogue
and write the parsed HTML out to gnucash readable files. *grin*

Though should anyone be interested in HBCI, the specs are available from
www.hbci-zka.de, also in English.

Anyway, gnucash is pretty awesome already; I am looking forward to work on it.
(Damn temptation - I mean, work _with_ it; I don't need yet another project,
really, I won't!)


-- 
"I'm extraordinarily patient provided I get my own way in the end."
        -- Margeret Thatcher