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Introducing Money in Excel, an easier way to manage your finances

50 points| yarapavan | 5 years ago |microsoft.com | reply

28 comments

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[+] ultra_nick|5 years ago|reply
I wish banks had API tokens, so that people didn't have to exchange their passwords for financial services.
[+] adarioble|5 years ago|reply
The UK has implemented Open Banking [1] and PSD2 directive since late 2018.

It allows apps to interconnect and pull data - I can use a single banking app to check balances across all my accounts.

[1] https://www.openbanking.org.uk

[+] nic-waller|5 years ago|reply
Me too. But I doubt it will ever happen without regulation.

The only development in this space that I'm aware of is from a South African company called root. You can run custom code before/after transactions through their credit card. https://root.co.za/card

[+] alteria|5 years ago|reply
And don't forget the middlemen that monetize your de-identified data in exchange for providing the service :)
[+] thebiss|5 years ago|reply
A few US banks (e.g. Capital One) provide a separate password for API access.

Unfortunately, it's rare.

[+] mdeeks|5 years ago|reply
Can it connect to Amazon and extract my purchases and classify them? Almost all of our purchases are from Amazon these days and categorizing them as "Shopping" or "General Merchandise" is almost useless. Someone please let me know if this exists somewhere.

Aside from that I'd also love the ability to amortize some of these yearly payments I have. When you're trying to answer "How much money am I putting away each month" all of these random yearly, quarterly, one-time expenses end up ruining that.

[+] cosmie|5 years ago|reply
Amazon doesn't expose that via an API, so the data you're after can't be gotten to easily. That said, there are a few options:

- This[1] report from Amazon gives you an incredibly detailed export of physical purchases. Caveat being that digital-only goods are missing, as well as items which didn't ship (either because you or because Amazon canceled the item prior to shipment). So depending on your purchase patterns, it may cover substantially all your needs or have so many holes in it as to be near useless.

- This[2] Github project exports your order history to a SQLite file. It's based on parsing/scraping the Order History pages themselves, so doesn't have the gap of the above report but also has the potential to break if/when Amazon changes the source code for the Orders page. The project hasn't been updated in several years, so no clue if the current parsing heuristics are valid or not.

- This[3] Github project is also based on scraping the Order History pages, but is much more recent than [2] and still being actively developed. However, [2] is designed as a ruby script that syncs a SQLite database whereas [3] runs as a Chrome extension.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/b2b/reports/

[2] https://github.com/chrisb/amazon-orders

[3] https://github.com/philipmulcahy/azad

[+] yurishimo|5 years ago|reply
The article says that they're using Plaid to make the connections. I imagine Plaid also powers the categorization of the data as well. This really just seems like a pretty wrapper of Plaid data, in which case, you probably won't get much value out of it if you're using other tools like YNAB.
[+] dalore|5 years ago|reply
MS Money reborn in Excel. I remember having to migrate my accounts away from MS Money.
[+] waynesonfire|5 years ago|reply
would be curious what ynab users think of this?
[+] ksd482|5 years ago|reply
I have used ynab and Quicken. The fundamental thing ynab was lacking for me was automatic pulling of data.

Quicken was too closed of a system and only supported a desktop version. So I gave up on both.

Excel looks promising since I am already familiar with the ecosystem, have excel skills and it isn't a closed system in that I can do whatever I want with the data easily. I'll check it out.

[+] TurkishPoptart|5 years ago|reply
I could never understand how YNAB was supposed to work. Why do people like it so much?
[+] spinchange|5 years ago|reply
I find it baffling that this template is inaccessible to users of Office 365 for business.
[+] dragonwriter|5 years ago|reply
It's not that baffling; Microsoft is selling Office 365 for Business for corporate accounts, and Office 365 Home for personal use, and expects users who have access to the former for corporate use to also have the latter for home use. Indeed, their Home Use Program which used to let corporate users let their employees purchase similar-level standalone products at a sharp discount to use on personal computers now has the primary option being a discount on Office 365 Home.

So, that it makes perfect sense that the personal finance solution that they intend to be a motivation to buy Office 365 Home isn't available on the Office 365 for Business accounts many of the people they want to sell Home to also already have access to.

[+] vscarpenter|5 years ago|reply
Exactly - this is a silly choice. Making it inaccessible to users of Office 365 for business is a terrible default choice.
[+] pmiller2|5 years ago|reply
That does seem silly on principle, but I doubt many Office 365 for Business users actually need such a thing anyway. Maybe it's some kind of bug or oversight?
[+] quasarj|5 years ago|reply
Ah man, excellent! The one thing I'm really missing in my current finance workflow is accidentally turning my money column into text and never being able to revert it!
[+] sprinfo|5 years ago|reply
So essentially it's Mint.