Pulling transactions as CSV files from almost all banks via Plaid with CLI

[Fang-Pen Lin]

Hi folks,

Many of you know that I have been building BeanHub. It's like a GitHub but for Beancount. I've already built an integration with Plaid and made most of our accounting books automatic. It took a lot of effort for us to pass security audits to get access to transaction data from some major banks like Chase. I wonder if some people don't like to use BeanHub as a hosting service, but they may find the ability to pull CSV files from the bank directly into their local machine securely useful. This is why I decided to build a new feature to allow people to only pull CSV files without hosting their accounting book on BeanHub:

https://beanhub.io/blog/2025/01/16/direct-connect-repository/

By doing so, it's also possible for ledger, hledger, or any other plain text accounting users to pull CSV data and consume them easily, not just for Beancount. I hope the whole community can grow bigger with better and easily accessible tools and some commercial support. Hope some of you find this feature helpful 😄