
Introducing Money in Excel, an easier way to manage your finances - yarapavan
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/06/15/introducing-money-excel-easier-manage-finances/
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ultra_nick
I wish banks had API tokens, so that people didn't have to exchange their
passwords for financial services.

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adarioble
The UK has implemented Open Banking [1] and PSD2 directive since late 2018.

It allows apps to interconnect and pull data - I can use a single banking app
to check balances across all my accounts.

[1] [https://www.openbanking.org.uk](https://www.openbanking.org.uk)

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ThePowerOfFuet
PSD2 is EU-wide. (I hope the UK doesn't roll it back!)

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sputr
Now if 'open' part of PSD2 open banking actually meant that I could access my
own bank account api, that would be great :).

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brnt
Unfortunately you need to be acredited to be able to get access to banks APIs
and in order to get acredited there are certain requirements such as needing
to be a legal entity. Alas, no dice for the enthusiasts.

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toomuchtodo
Could enthusiasts not form a non profit entity to receive accreditation and
delegate access?

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sputr
There are other, such as capital, cash flow and licensing requirements.... As
far as I can tell.

I was very disappointed when I found this out too. Fail.

There will probably be resellers offering api access to our own data (I think
that's the deal with tokens.io) so... classic lobbiest produced walled garden
to limit free enterprise and competition.

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mdeeks
Can it connect to Amazon and extract my purchases and classify them? Almost
all of our purchases are from Amazon these days and categorizing them as
"Shopping" or "General Merchandise" is almost useless. Someone please let me
know if this exists somewhere.

Aside from that I'd also love the ability to amortize some of these yearly
payments I have. When you're trying to answer "How much money am I putting
away each month" all of these random yearly, quarterly, one-time expenses end
up ruining that.

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cosmie
Amazon doesn't expose that via an API, so the data you're after can't be
gotten to easily. That said, there are a few options:

\- This[1] report from Amazon gives you an incredibly detailed export of
physical purchases. Caveat being that digital-only goods are missing, as well
as items which didn't ship (either because you or because Amazon canceled the
item prior to shipment). So depending on your purchase patterns, it may cover
substantially all your needs or have so many holes in it as to be near
useless.

\- This[2] Github project exports your order history to a SQLite file. It's
based on parsing/scraping the Order History pages themselves, so doesn't have
the gap of the above report but also has the potential to break if/when Amazon
changes the source code for the Orders page. The project hasn't been updated
in several years, so no clue if the current parsing heuristics are valid or
not.

\- This[3] Github project is also based on scraping the Order History pages,
but is much more recent than [2] and still being actively developed. However,
[2] is designed as a ruby script that syncs a SQLite database whereas [3] runs
as a Chrome extension.

[1]
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/b2b/reports/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/b2b/reports/)

[2] [https://github.com/chrisb/amazon-
orders](https://github.com/chrisb/amazon-orders)

[3]
[https://github.com/philipmulcahy/azad](https://github.com/philipmulcahy/azad)

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yurishimo
The article says that they're using Plaid to make the connections. I imagine
Plaid also powers the categorization of the data as well. This really just
seems like a pretty wrapper of Plaid data, in which case, you probably won't
get much value out of it if you're using other tools like YNAB.

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dalore
MS Money reborn in Excel. I remember having to migrate my accounts away from
MS Money.

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waynesonfire
would be curious what ynab users think of this?

~~~
TurkishPoptart
I could never understand how YNAB was supposed to work. Why do people like it
so much?

~~~
pfranz
I really wish there was more granular nomenclature around budgeting.
"Budgeting" varies so much and the splash page rarely helps. So I will often
have to download or sign up for the app, attach actual data (which I'm less
than eager to do) and poke around. When looking at credit unions they touted
their website's features but were surprised when I asked if there was a way I
could demo it.

YNAB uses a variation of the "envelope method." You categorize money earned.
Then that gets deducted by expenses. In meatspace you would take your paycheck
in cash and split it into labeled envelopes and use that for spending. This is
a simplification of what YNAB does and there are other free tools that use
this method.

Mint and Money in Excel take transactions and categorize them. From there you
can look at the history of the category or look at net worth or income/expense
over time. When you set a "budget" it's just a number you set based on
previous month's spending and it's unrelated to your income. These generally
suck for non-monthly expenses like property tax or my bi-monthly trash bill.

YNAB /can/ do charts and trends, but they often encourage a "fresh start"
which starts everything over and don't have great tools around historical
data. So you can't look back that far. With Excel it's just a spreadsheet so
if you have the data in any format you can pull it in.

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spinchange
I find it baffling that this template is inaccessible to users of Office 365
for business.

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dragonwriter
It's not that baffling; Microsoft is selling Office 365 for Business for
corporate accounts, and Office 365 Home for personal use, and expects users
who have access to the former for corporate use to also have the latter for
home use. Indeed, their Home Use Program which used to let corporate users let
their employees purchase similar-level standalone products at a sharp discount
to use on personal computers now has the primary option being a discount on
Office 365 Home.

So, that it makes perfect sense that the personal finance solution that they
intend to be a motivation to buy Office 365 Home isn't available on the Office
365 for Business accounts many of the people they want to sell Home to also
already have access to.

~~~
spinchange
I own a couple of extra licenses of Office 365 for Business that I've already
paid for. I just want to check out the excel template- I don't need Office 365
for Home. I have a business license on the machine I use at home. I would pay
something for the template. I'm not changing versions of excel and the whole
suite just to check it out.

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quasarj
Ah man, excellent! The one thing I'm really missing in my current finance
workflow is accidentally turning my money column into text and never being
able to revert it!

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sprinfo
So essentially it's Mint.

