Caspion - Automated expense tracking from Israeli banks and credit cards

Many people track their expenses with spreadsheets or with budgeting apps (like YNAB).

The most annoying part of this process is transferring the data from the banks or credit cards to the budgeting tool you use. It usually requires you to go to the website of each one of your banks and credit cards, and manually copy the data to your budgeting tool.

This project aims to automate this process by fetching the data automatically from your Israeli financial institutions and sending it to the budgeting tool of your choice.

In addition, it can automatically set an expense category for transactions according to predefined patterns.

Internally it uses the Israeli bank scrapers npm package.

If you want to ask questions, suggest features or report issues, join our discord channel.

Note

We are in transition to a new UI. Some features don't yet exist in the new UI and will be added overtime. You can still access the old UI by clicking on the switch next to ממשק חדש.

Features

• One click to fetch transactions from multiple Israeli banks and credit cards
• Exporting transactions to Google Sheets, YNAB, Excel (CSV) or JSON file
• A basic UI for configuration

Running the app

Download the latest version from Releases page, or build it from source, with the instructions below. (Mac users, you may follow these instructions).

Initial setup

The first time you run the app, you will need to set up the accounts you want to fetch data from (importers).

Now you can set up the exporters - where the data will be sent to. The CSV exporter is enabled by default. If you want to export to YNAB, see instructions at the end of the README.

Report a problem

We are still in beta, and you may find errors. Please use the REPORT A PROBLEM button in the app to report to us.

Use this button to find the logs folder as well.

Running in a development environment

Prerequisites

• NodeJS.

• node-gyp. In Windows you have a checkbox in the NodeJS installer to install also the node-gyp.
  This module is for packages that compile native code in their installation, in our case it is required for electron and keytar. (Note that if you install visual studio, you need to add the workload of desktop development with C++)

• Yarn.

Linux Prerequisites

Currently, this project depends on libsecret, so you may need to install it before running yarn.

Depending on your distribution, you will need to run the following command:

• Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install libsecret-1-dev
• Red Hat-based: sudo yum install libsecret-devel
• Arch Linux: sudo pacman -S libsecret

Mac Prerequisites

For M1 macs, if you get an error while scraping due to not being able to download chromium, download it manually as described here. Then in the settings, set the chromium path to be the result of which chromium

Start from Source

• Run yarn to install the dependencies
• Run yarn serve to start the app
• Set up additional exporters (Optional)
  • If you want to set up YNAB or Google Sheets, see instructions below
• Run by clicking on the Run button in the app
• Configure automatic category classification (Optional)
  • Open categoryCalculationScript.js. This file contains the patterns for classifying transactions to categories automatically.
  • Edit this file to add any mapping from function description to category that fits your needs.
  • If using YNAB, the categories you return must match category names in YNAB

Building for production

• Run yarn build

YNAB integration setup (optional)

YNAB is a budgeting software. If you want to manage your budget there and have your expenses updated automatically to YNAB follow these steps:

• Create an account in YNAB
• Create in YNAB unlinked accounts for each financial account you want to track (bank accounts and credit cards)
• Get the YNAB access token
  • In YNAB go to Account settings -> Developer settings
  • Click on New Token and generate
  • On the top of the screen you will see the full token (the token with XXXX in it is not the full one).
  • Save this token in the YNAB settings in the app.
• Choose your budget from the dropdown
• Fill the table containing account number to ynab account id mapping
  • For each account you want to track add another row to the table
  • The account number could be the credit card number, or the bank account number. To be sure, you can run the app so it exports transactions to a CSV and get the account number from there.
  • Then choose the matching a ynab account from the dropdown
• Click on Save to save the configuration

Google Sheets integration setup - when building from source code (optional)

If you set Google Sheets as an exporter the transactions results will appear in a dedicated sheet. In the release version of Caspion, this integration will work out of the box. If you wish though to build/debug this from source, you will need to setup your own test OAuth 2.0 Client on GCP (Google Cloud Platform). Follow these steps:

• Create a new project in GCP
• Enable Google Sheets API
• On the left panel, click to create OAuth consent screen
• Now you are ready to create your credentials that will be used later on by Caspion
  • On the left panel, click "Credentials" -> "CREATE CREDENTIALS" (on the top) -> "OAuth 2.0 Client IDs"
  • Application Type: "Web Application"
  • Authorized JavaScript origins, add: http://localhost
  • Authorized redirect URIs, add: http://127.0.0.1:42813/callback and/or http://localhost:42813/callback
  • Save.
  • Write down the generated Client ID & Client Secret

Now that you have the keys above, store them as env variables:

EXPORT GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID=XXXXX
EXPORT GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET=YYYYYY

That's it. Next time you'll run the code a one time OAuth authorization window will appear and ask for access.

CSV (Excel) Note

In some cases you may get gibberish when you open the CSV file in Excel. In this case, please follow the next steps:

1. Open a new Excel document.
2. Go to Data -> Import From CSV/Text.
3. Select your CSV file.
4. For the "Encoding"/"File Origin", select Unicode UTF-8 (65001).

Release

The Release workflow, configured in .github/workflows/release.yml, will draft a new release or update the artifacts on an existing draft, according to the following conditions:

1. A change pushed to the master branch.
2. The version from the package.json, with the prefix v, is not a published release.
3. Upload the artifacts to the v${package_version} Github Release.

It means that after you published a new release, from the Github interface, you need to upgrade the version in the package.json file, to get a new draft.

Disclaimer

Providing your financial account credentials to software is not risk free. We will do our best to protect your credentials, but we take no responsibility for any possible damages. If you want to use this we suggest you ask your financial institution for credentials for a user that has only read access to the relevant account and use those credentials to reduce the potential risk.