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This tool has been very useful for me for the last year. The satisfaction of building your own tool combined with the ability to make the tool exactly what you need have both combined to make this feel like a resounding success so far. That said, there is plenty of room for improvement here.
Today, I'm importing 2 months worth of transactions and working through our taxes for 2023. I'm going to take notes here while I do that, focusing on making small improvements along the way and taking notes about larger ones.
Budget importing
First things first: collecting all the necessary CSVs. This is a big pain in the butt, lots of manual labor here. I need to figure out what the latest transaction is for a specific account, then log in and download the right file, then import. Some banks make this worse than others.
The CSVs that are downloaded are, in my mind, fairly important to keep, even if they are't used for importing, as they are the Source of Truth for transactions. The problem is that some banks only allow you to download a limited number of files (like, only 12 months) so this needs to be done on a regular basis (even if only annually). The only option I can think of is some kind of browser extension or automation or headless to do the steps. It has to be downloaded directly from the bank app so I don't know that there is a solution here.
Once they're downloaded, it's time to run an import. It looks like all the defaults are working well for the import year but it could probably have a config option to point to a default directory. ✅
One big problem with importing is that if you make a mistake you need to cancel the process and start over. I looked into this before and it didn't look like there was anything in prompt.js to help with this. I think the most simple way around this is to provide a summary of everything before saving it and requiring the user to accept it. This is one more step but would dovetail with the auto-categorization.