BeanHub Connect: Automatic transactions import from 12,000+ banks

[Fang-Pen Lin]

Hi, fellow Beancount users,

Since I started using Beancount, I have dreamed of making it fully automatic. For a few years now, I've been building tools for that goal. Connecting to the bank and fetching data directly from there is one of the goals I want to achieve. I built this feature and have been testing it for a while for my accounting book. Now my Beancount books are 80% fully automatic. I can open my repository, and the transactions from the bank will automatically appear as a new commit like this without me lifting a finger:


Today, the feature is released. Here's the blog post:

https://beanhub.io/blog/2024/06/24/introduction-of-beanhub-connect/

The whole import system is based on our open-source beanhub-import and beanhub-extract. The only proprietary part in the import flow is the Plaid integration. So, suppose you don't trust me and still want to import transactions automatically. As long as you connect to Plaid and write CSV files based on the transactions you fetched from Plaid, you should be able to have the same automatic transaction importing system without using the BeanHub service.

I am also considering building this feature to encrypt all the bank transaction data from Plaid against your public key. If you don't want the hassle of integrating Plaid yourself, you can still use an open-source tool to pull the data from BeanHub and decrypt it locally.

I hope some of you find it helpful. Any feedback is welcome! 🙌

[Chary Chary]

Hello,

I looked at the beanhub.

Very impressive application!

Must be a lot of development hours there.

Just out of curiosity: have you got any customers yet?

[Fang-Pen Lin]

Yeah, not much, but we have a few paying customers already.

And yes, it took quite some efforts to build 😅

[Chary Chary]

I wish you all the success in your undertaking!

Your documentation seems to be very thorough, but may I suggest to make a short introduction video, something like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FFCi0Fhjhg&list=PLBhp08L1oX5k3NarewqqCqtgtnDzlCxAb&index=7

I think it will help a lot to attract new users. 

[Fang-Pen Lin]

Thank you so much for the kind words and that's a great idea about making a short video! I will definitely make one at somepoint.

As you said must be lot of development hours, I forgot to mention, I actually spent two years in just building the infrastructure with container technologies. Despite that not all of the BeanHub is open-sourced, I tried my best to share what I have learned from building it. I wrote some blog articles explaining the technologies BeanHub developed. For example, we had this article for introducing how we use container to contain the potential danger of processing Beancount files:

How BeanHub works part1, contains the danger of processing Beancount data with sandbox

Today I published another article about using container image as a way to host the Git repositories:

How BeanHub works part2, large-scale auditable Git repository system based on container layers

So yeah, that's lots of hours to get just the infra tech works, and that's why I haven't built too many features yet until recently 😅 Anyway, hope some of you may find these posts interesting.