aqbanking / ofx - account versus user

[Jessica Parsons]

> I'm not clear on the difference as you see it between a user account and a
> monetary account.  Nonetheless, I assume that both types of account are at
> a single institution, so the institution information would be in common
> and therefore would naturally be represented in the user/monetary account
> info by a link to the institution info. (-Paul)

By user account, I mean the tag that identifies me as a user/customer when I
log in to an online banking site.  With all but one of my financial
institutions, I log in with a user name or ID that is *not* my account
number, and with that ID, I access all "monetary" accounts to which I have
been authorized to access.

By "monetary" account, I was referring to the actual accounts held by the
institution, independent of how they are accessed--checking, savings,
brokerage, credit card, etc.  One user account may access many monetary
accounts, and one monetary account may be accessed by more than one user.

For example, my husband and I might have a variety of accounts at Bank
A--let's say one joint checking account and a savings account for each of
us.  Bank A issues one online user account for me, and one for my husband.
When I log in, I can access the joint account and my savings, and when he
logs in, he also sees the joint account, as well as his savings, but not
mine.  If we want to track all of these accounts with aqbanking, we will
need to set up two "users" (each of our online user accounts) and three
"accounts" (the monetary accounts--one checking and two savings), all at one
institution.  The current setup accommodates this, but an
institution/account setup would not.


>Of course, there should be better documentation for the GUI dialogs... But
>since I encountered only a few users of the OFX DirectConnect backend so
far
>working on the documentation of the setings of this particular protocol
wasn't
>that high on my priority list ;-)  (-Martin)

I didn't intend for my comment to be pointing a finger at what you haven't
done (and I'm happy to help with documentation if I can).  What I wanted to
get across was that, in terms of prioritizing the time available to spend on
the project as a whole, I would personally put documentation as a higher
priority than the idea of restructuring the setup process to avoid the
occasional hassle of re-inputting institution information.  It may still be
a lower priority than other aspects of the project as a whole, and I
appreciate all that you've done.


Jessica