The Buxfer Post

Until now, we had a very restrictive format in which we accepted CSV files for import. This was a big pain not only because of the strict format, but because one would need to manually convert (into the format we required) a bank-downloaded CSV every single time one wanted to import.

Not anymore.

We now accept almost all formats for CSVs as long as each transaction line contains at least the following fields:

date, description and amount

Each line may also contain an optional tag field.

These fields may occur in any order which we will try our best to identify. We will also try our best to get rid of the garbage that most banks like spewing in their CSV files. If we don’t succeed, we will ask you for help — only one time per account. So once you have set this up, future CSV imports into that account will all be achieved with a single click.

Enjoy!

A couple behind-the-scenes changes:

• Better duplicate detection: Our duplicate detection system is now much smarter. If you report transactions manually (e.g., from your mobile phones) and then sync your bank account, we will correctly identify the duplicates — even when the dates don’t match exactly! There’s also a “Find duplicates” link for those who want to inspect their accounts to search for old duplicates.

  This detection extends to our account transfer identification rules as well. If you mark a transaction as a transfer from account A to account B, we will go looking for a possible duplicate transaction in account B, and get rid of it automatically.

• Better summary reports: We have significantly enhanced our daily and weekly email reports to provide you with more in-depth and relevant information about your Buxfer account. Daily reports now provide a summary of your debts with your friends. Weekly reports provide you with a summary of your account balances as well.

We have been working hard to provide fully automatic synchronization for a broader set of financial institutions. Last night we took a big step forward in this direction. Buxfer now supports fully automatic and secure synchronization with any financial institution in the world. Well, at least the ones that let you download statements in Quicken/MS Money format.

For around 300 institutions, we already supported synchronization via our web interface. However, you had to login and manually synchronize each account. We now provide you with two options for automatic synchronization:

• Automatic sync every night: You can choose to encrypt and store your username/password on our server, and your account will be automatically synchronized every night.
• Automatic sync on every login: You can store your username/password offline on your computer using Google Gears. Every time you login, new transactions will be automatically downloaded into your account.

For institutions that can not be synced from the web interface, we have released Firebux, a Firefox add-on which automates the process of downloading your bank statement and uploading it into your Buxfer account.

• Automatic: Show Firebux once how to download a statement from your bank’s website, and thereafter Firebux will do it automatically
• Secure: Store private data securely on your computer, and never share it with our servers
• Convenient: Quickly access account balances, analysis charts and budgets

Transactions in your bank or credit card statements which are actually account transfers show up as expenses (sometimes in multiple accounts). Its quite a hassle to manually mark each one of these transactions as an account transfer. Last night, we released a feature which gets makes this a lot easier:

• Mark as account transfer: The ‘Actions’ menu for each transaction contains an action to quickly edit a transaction into an account transfer
• Automatic account transfer detection: You can automate the rule for detecting account transfers. For example, you can set up a rule which says

  always mark transactions matching ATM Withdrawal as transfers from my Checking account to my Wallet

We have changed our API in an important way in order to prevent Cross Site Request Forgery attacks. APIs which use implicit authentication - e.g., HTTP Basic authentication or cookies - are vulnerable to such attacks.

What’s the change?

1. We have added an explicit ‘login’ command which returns a “token” for the session if the login is successful.
2. Subsequent commands in the session must all include this token in order to be processed.
3. The token expires after a “reasonable” time-out — on the order of 10 minutes or so.

I hope it will not be too much of a hassle for you to adapt your scripts. Security is paramount when it comes to handling finances.

No its not an April Fools gimmick. We have added an easy way to synchronize all your bank and credit card accounts. Click on the ‘Synchronize all’ link you see on your account summary page, and you will see a list of your accounts that can be automatically synchronized. You can login to them all at once, and download all your new expenses in one go. You can use Google Gears to store these credentials offline on your computer, so next time you don’t even have to type in your username and password.

Banks or credit card statements are filled with (mostly irrelevant) junk surrounding the main description or payee. And even if we allow you to set automatic tags and get classification done properly, it’s still an annoyance to see those ugly descriptions lying around. Plus, editing every single one is a pain.

No more.

We have added support for easy automatic renaming of transaction descriptions. To get rid of all transactions which look like

CHECK PUR SAFEWAY STORE#12188989 SUNNYVA CA

just set up a rule which says

rename transactions matching SAFEWAY STORE to Safeway

and be done with it!

We just released a brand new mobile interface for Buxfer, which provides offline access to your data with the help of Google Gears for mobile. So you can access Buxfer from your mobile device even when you are not connected to the internet! If you are always on the go, and hate to go online just to check your bank balance, then this is just what you have been looking for. Just point your browser to:

 http://m.buxfer.com

Google Gears is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality. Today, Google released a version of Google Gears for the Windows Mobile platform, and we are glad to launch our offline mobile app in collaboration with Google. Support for more mobile platforms is in the works.

In online mode, the mobile interface lets you access your bank account balances, transactions, and analysis charts. You can add/edit accounts, transactions or tags. You can even synchronize your bank accounts right from your cellphone! More features should be coming your way shortly …

In offline mode, you can access all the above features in a read-only mode. You won’t be able to add new transactions or edit your tags, but you can still view your account balances, recent transactions and analysis charts.

We are very pleased to announce that you can now access your Buxfer data and analytics programatically with our REST API.

So, what can you do with the API?

• You can create a widget to automatically update your account balances on your desktop every 15 minutes. Simply send the following request periodically and you are done!
  

  https://www.buxfer.com/api/accounts.xml

• Perhaps, you want to look at your analysis pie chart, but you want to restrict analysis to your credit card account. Just type in the following and out comes a pie-chart! Tweak the URL to your heart’s wish, and get near-instanteneous analytics!
  

  https://www.buxfer.com/api/analysis.html?accountName=Mastercard

  

• Mash up your financial data with other services out there on the web! In the previous example, we used Google’s Chart API to produce compelling visualizations. You can do so with tons of other services to create useful tools.

So get creative and start hacking!

Need more info?

• Read the API overview
• Understand the security issues
• Dig into the complete documentation
• Get started with sample clients in Perl, Python, Ruby and PHP.

Like all things, we think this is only a first step; please let us know whether you can build interesting applications using the API. If not, let us know which API calls you would like to be added, and which cut out to keep the API lean.

Some of you might have received 20-30 emails too many from Buxfer, this morning! Sorry folks, we screwed up. Please accept our apologies.

We have taken care of this issue now, and everything should be working fine. Thanks for your patience.