Filing system improvements (step 2)

I don’t know who you bank with, but just to point out Perl’s Finance::Bank, which is quite a neat way of scraping statement info out of lots of bank websites. For banks not covered, I’ve had success with using BeautifulSoup in Python to scrape similar transaction info without too much pain (20 lines of code).

Obviously they’re not Ruby, but you’d probably want to run the bank-scraping on a firewalled machine anyway.

I’ve absolutely no idea how a bank would expose such functionality, or whether any such API would be provided at all. Public API access into a bank account would clearly be very troublesome. After all – many banks don’t even have mobile bank access apps and of those that do, there’s only one app, from the bank itself.

There are APIs for debit/credit card processing but that’s a wholly different issue (a third party, no direct bank account access); those can themselves be fiddly and troublesome though and many now require JavaScript, so instead we route through PayPal which is still just about usable with NetSurf.

See controllers/payment_gateway_* and models/payment_* along with the Donations controller and model in:

https://www.riscosopen.org/tracker/repository/browse/rool/rails/canvass/trunk/app

I did miss the comment from Sprow that PayPal appears to provide “subscribe” buttons – maybe that’s the way forward here?

I’ve absolutely no idea how a bank would expose such functionality, or whether any such API would be provided at all.

IME banks don’t expose APIs, at least High Street banks don’t to retail customers (which is roughly what small businesses are, just with all the special offers removed).

What I was envisaging is:
Some machine, maybe a desktop box somewhere, does an automated login to internet banking, scrapes the statement info, and puts it in (say) a CSV file. This machine should be very very firewalled because it has to know the internet banking login credentials (and I assume you can login for basic statement info without a card reader). This will be flaky and potentially break when the bank changes their internet banking interface (which is not that often). This runs as a batch job (eg first thing in the morning).

That CSV statement info is passed to something which sanitises it by selecting only the transactions of interest (eg via the payment reference). That transaction info is then pushed out to the ROOL webserver for matching against the bounty info.

I did miss the comment from Sprow that PayPal appears to provide “subscribe” buttons – maybe that’s the way forward here?

Might be easier than my suggestion!

It’s good that this method of regular donation is being looked at again as it could vastly increase income for ROOL. When I first suggested it way back on the Forum, Bounties, ROOL Administration thread, I was thinking of it for only the Administration Bounty, to answer a point in a previous post on this thread. A fiver a month given by, say, 100 (hopefully more) supporters is not to be sneezed at. Do the sums. :-)

I’ve added a button for setting up recurring donations to this page. Hopefully, we can get it added to the Bounties page shortly, too.

At last!