Any ideas for creating a automation for downloading bank/financial statements?

macOS
21

I hope that you will post your progress as you solution develops.

22

@mgguinne I would likewise be interested to hear as your solution develops!

23

Thanks all, you have inspired me to document some of what I do (Thanks). Though it will be a slow process, I do want to make it happen though.

First up, in response to OP @iPersuade, In Australia, most providers are moving towards making you sign in to get PDF statements etc. I have one provider now that to get the email with the PDF you have to log in first and then hit “Email me pdf”. I am unaware of any Bank here that won’t have you auth first. So I won’t be able to help with that.

A really quick high level of my workflow is something like this:

VISION: Have an Airtable that shows all my bills, with the PDF (in Onedrive) and any metadata (due date, amount, type) so that my wife or I can view these easily at any time.

  1. HAZEL: All PDF"s get moved from my downloads folder to an iCloud PDF folder to the bills folder by HAZEl
  2. HAZEL: I have several rules to look for my bill PDFs and then process them and email them to my cloud workflow (this is overkill but keeps one process for all bills so they get added to Airtable)
    3 MAKE: Has a webhook email that is used as a trigger to kick the flow off (I was trying to poll Gmail every 15 mins and ran out of credit very quickly, this is a much better solution, I heard @RosemaryOrchard share it once on an episode of automation and it was a turning point). I can also send any email PDF’s to make via Gmail rules for bills
    4 MAKE: Make saves the file to one drive, create an air table record and send an alert to Telegram (I was using Pushover but found Telegram much more versatile, still migrating, though). The big thing here is what I need to do local metadata adding and getting this data back in the air table record (via Hazel) is that it “renames the file to the Airtable record ID”. I also have the Onedrive URL that can be used to open the PDF in the future
    5 HAZEL: Process the one drive folder the file was moved into and get all the data from the bill, then run an AppleScript to post all the data to Excel (for testing), send a Telegram alert and finally (the part I have not done yet) is posting the data back to airtable via their API using Python (I do this for something else so it just a matter of converting it).

More to add, but I need to write a test flow now to get the email part working.

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24

Yes, it’s the same in the US. We are going backwards and have to sign in and then manually download each and every statement or tax document. Not just documents, but now OFX transactions can’t be downloaded automatically. I’m back at manually going to each biller and bank to download statements and my transaction history.

It get’s my tin hat itching to come out of the closet as to why in 2024 there is no way to have statments and transactions electronically delivered. Given that very little information is actually allowed on the documents themselves that isn’t already publically available. If you have a house in the US your name and address are everywhere already. Account numbers and social security numbers are not allowed. Think about who wins when you can’t keep track of your money and investments easily.

I’m looking for new solutions. Can’t wait to hear how you do. If you get it working and can provide an easy solution, I would be interested.

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25

I am all finished, and it all works well! Sure, in some places, I have to log in and download the PDF, but then my automation takes care of the rest.

I have done some YouTube videos on this (I’m just getting started and unsure if I made these ones public). Let me know if you are keen (or others), and I can add to my list to dig them out and make public and post links here )

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26

I would be very interested to see videos or anything else you have prepared regarding your effort.

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