[diftraku]

I'd be really curious on how hard programmatic access to your own, personal banking data might be in the PSD2-era.

I can link my secondary bank account to my main bank's app so I can see the balance in one place, but the catch is that I need to refresh this authorization through the app every 90 days.

Ideally, you'd just use your banking credentials to authorise the API access and pull data through that. What this requires in practice, I have no idea but it probably involves a bit of bureucracy.

[Nextgrid]

Some modern banks (Monzo, Starling, etc) give the account holder (read-only) access to their API.

If you can't, you can try use one of the open banking providers such as TrueLayer, Plaid, Nordigen (seems to be acquired by GoCardless: https://gocardless.com/bank-account-data/), etc. Most have a free/dev tier that nevertheless allows connections to real accounts and might be enough for personal use.

Finally, screen-scraping is potentially an option. One of the few benefits of shifting everything to SPAs is that you generally have clean JSON APIs under the hood that are easier to interface with than "conventional" screen-scraping involving parsing HTML.

[jazzyjackson]

Ran into this annoyance recently setting up new accounting software, that the access my bank provides is last 6 months only, so I still had to go and export a csv, rejigger the column names and date format, to reimport the first 8 months of 2024.

My thought for working around tracking new transactions without a third party is to just set up email alerts so I get a notification on every charge, deposit etc and set up some cron job to read new emails and update my books.