pepperfox

Background

Once upon a time there were several Personal Finance software programs you ran on your own computer to "manage your finances". One of these was Microsoft Money and banks and brokerages adhered to the OFX Standard for their data exporting and usually had OFX Servers in the cloud that would return your transaction data to you.

Today many of those servers are gone and you have to download the .ofx files manually if possible. Some Financial Institutions may only give you mostly useless .csv files.

After Microsoft discontinued support of Money they did give the world a free, Deluxe Sunset Version. And you could get a package called PocketSense that helped with the data importing.

Solution

Well to get back to the heyday of adherence to Standards you can combine a few technologies:

• An account on Mint which can still talk to Financial Institutions,
• The open source mintapi which can extract data from mint.com as .json files,
• This technology, pepperfox which can convert those .json files into .ofx files,
• And PocketSense which will feed them into Microsoft Money.

These are easy to install on a Linux without being root. The mintapi and pepperfox components are implemented as Docker images so you don't need to worry about conflicts between versions of, say, python needed by mintapi and whatever you otherwise need on your Linux. You do need to have docker installed and fixed so you can run it without being root.

Installation

You can create a new account on Mint just for these purposes and add your "troublesome" accounts. It is fussy about authentication and I've found the only method that works well for mintapi is the soft-token method. You'll need to have Google Authenticator or an equivalent TOTP program. Please follow the instructions in MFA Authentication Methods to set things up with Mint and get the 32-character soft-token you will need to set up your cloud connection.

To get the software

wget https://pepperfox.biggianthead.org/install-pepperfox.sh
sh install-pepperfox.sh

which will put stuff in your $HOME/pepperfox directory. Then to connect things up, run

$HOME/pepperfox/bin/setup <mint-email> <mint-password> <soft-token>

and you should be good to go.

Usage

Whenever you want to get recent transaction data (last 3 months) just do:

$HOME/pepperfox/bin/run

and then move the files in the $HOME/pepperfox/ofx directory to your .../pocketsense/import/ directory for PocketSense to process. Voila!

For now, pepperfox Version 1.0 only handles credit card transactions. Version 2.0 will also handle checking and savings accounts.