Open source personal finance APIs?

Question

Do any open source APIs or libraries exist for personal finance applications? I'm thinking checking accounts, savings accounts, credit card accounts - Quicken-like models, basically. I found this: http://pf-api.sourceforge.net/javadoc/index.html, but the project appears inactive and incomplete.

Answer 1

It has been suggested to use libraries from the Gnucash or Homebank projects.

Answer 2

There was some standardization put into place a while back i think mainly for MS Money and QuickBooks. It is called Open Financial Exchange (OFX). A great source of information is located at http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/OFX_Direct_Connect_Bank_Settings If that URL doesn't help the term OFX should yield tons of help on google.

Answer 3

Another approach to consider... although not open-source... is to build your application on top of an existing API surfaced by a firm such as Mint or Wesabe. This would introduce the dependency that your user's are already registered with either of those services, but Mint/Wesabe will have taken care of the data collection and cleansing for you.

Unfortunately, Wesabe's API documentation appears to be offline. Mint at the moment doesn't expose an API, however Mint themselves use the services of a firm called Yodlee which has mechanisms to access account transaction history with a large number of (US-only I believe) financial firms. Access to the Yodlee API is unlikely to be free however.