Automatic and secure synchronization for all banks … anywhere in the world!
April 22nd, 2008 by ShashankWe have been working hard to provide fully automatic synchronization for a broader set of financial institutions. Last night we took a big step forward in this direction. Buxfer now supports fully automatic and secure synchronization with any financial institution in the world. Well, at least the ones that let you download statements in Quicken/MS Money format.
For around 300 institutions, we already supported synchronization via our web interface. However, you had to login and manually synchronize each account. We now provide you with two options for automatic synchronization:
- Automatic sync every night: You can choose to encrypt and store your username/password on our server, and your account will be automatically synchronized every night.
- Automatic sync on every login: You can store your username/password offline on your computer using Google Gears. Every time you login, new transactions will be automatically downloaded into your account.
For institutions that can not be synced from the web interface, we have released Firebux, a Firefox add-on which automates the process of downloading your bank statement and uploading it into your Buxfer account.
- Automatic: Show Firebux once how to download a statement from your bank’s website, and thereafter Firebux will do it automatically
- Secure: Store private data securely on your computer, and never share it with our servers
- Convenient: Quickly access account balances, analysis charts and budgets
April 24th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
Hi-
I appreciate all the time and effort you all are putting into Buxfer. Could there be some sort of duplicate checking system put in place so that entries already present in the ledger don’t get duplicated when synchronizing accounts? Thanks!
April 26th, 2008 at 1:48 am
Steve - we do perform duplicate detection automatically, but it looks (from some other users’ responses as well) that there’s a mismatch between the dates reported by a user manually, and the date on which the transaction actually clears the account and is reported by the bank. We use the transaction amount and the date to detect a match.
That said, I am working on adding a special duplicate detection function which will provide our users yet another knob for controlling how we should detect and flag duplicates. Please stay tuned!
April 26th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Hey Buxfer team - I just wanted to take a minute to say how incredibly awesome this service is becoming.
I used to waste so much time logging into 3 different website portals to check my account balances, and then have to download it all into Quicken. Buxfer has taken personal finance tracking to a whole new level - I can do everything from one incredibly simple, easy-to-use, and feature-packed user interface.
The chronjob you just set up for auto-syncing of accounts on a nightly basis means that I can simply check all my stuff from my phone now and not worry about having to syncronize. Not to mention all the awesome ajax functionality present throughout the site, and the graphically-superior e-mail summaries I receive each week!
Keep up the work guys - it’ll pay off for sure!
May 18th, 2008 at 5:47 am
Hi
I really want to use this feature but its not working for me. I have banking and credit card accounts with citibank india which I access on http://www.online.citibank.co.in and not on http://www.citibank.com. It doesn’t support any format other than pdf and excel. I tried using firebux, manual uploading but no luck. I want to use automatic sync feature. Can this be done?
May 25th, 2008 at 1:49 am
My bank also only supports CSV output (it’s in Israel, people don’t use Quicken or Money here because we have a different tax system).
Any chance of building in CSV support?
May 25th, 2008 at 1:53 am
ezuk,
The website already supports importing CSV files, and we are working on supporting it with Firebux as well. Please subscribe to our blog feed, we will make a posting as soon as that feature is available.
May 25th, 2008 at 1:57 am
Prashant,
Can you send an email to support@buxfer.com with details of why your Citibank account doesn’t work with Firebux?
May 25th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
First congratulations for the hours you guys spent on producing such a state-of-the-art service.
Any chance adding ‘UBS’ in your list of institutions for synchronization via the web interface?
Also when should we expect the CSV file compatibility with Firebux?
Cheers,
June 5th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
I am big fan of buxfer and using it regularly. I was just wondering if you can add the support of adding transactions via firebux? because that’d be great, we wouldn’t have to login to buxfer every time!
June 6th, 2008 at 1:01 am
toyio: we keep working on adding support for newer banks but I can’t give you a definite date on when we can add international banks like UBS into our list natively. Regarding CSV compatibility with Firebux, I am actively working on it. We hope to have an improved version out in the next 2-3 weeks. Thanks for your patience, there are a bunch of other cool things we are working on - hopefully the wait will be worthwhile!
June 18th, 2008 at 10:58 pm
Hi there,
I haven’t found a way to export my financial data in my online-banking portal yet.
But I know my German bank supports connection to Quicken and HBCI.
What to do about my bank (and other credit (card) institutes), if they don’t offer anything like that?
Makes it useless for me, no matter which program I use.
Thanks for your help in advance.
June 19th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Hagata: we are working on adding HBCI support using PIN/TAN for German banks. If your bank offers download support in OFX / QFX or QIF formats, you can automate the upload process using our Firefox extension (Firebux). We are working on enabling CSV support in Firebux as well. But if none of these download formats are offered, there’s not much we can do.
June 27th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Hi, I used to use an old version of MS Money that I randomly found on my computer, and I was thrilled to find out about Buxfer yesterday. However, I have two things to point out:
-Schwab has two different banks depending on your type of account, and Buxfer only support one. Schwab One accounts are under “Charles Schwab & Co., Inc.,” while Buxfer will only access “Charles Schwab Bank.” Sooooo, it’d be great if you support both.
-The interface for assigning tags in the transaction history makes it pretty easy to accidentally re-tag a lot of different transactions with the same name (by creating a rule). Not sure how to correct that, I just noticed it happened a lot when I was tagging the transactions in my first big statement upload. Also, it seems like sometimes your (intentional) tag rules must match the exact text of a given transaction starting at the beggining of its description, while other times the tag rule will apply to every transaction with the keywords anywhere in the description. I had to make some of my rules more specific and exclusive than I would have liked because I had to use the exact starting description text.
Great job, this is an awesome alternative to expensive, non-web based stuff and has more functionality in some ways. Keep it up!
Marshall
June 27th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Marshall: Thanks a lot for the comments. I will investigate the matter regarding Charles Schwab and see what we can do to support both variants.
Regarding tag matching: we will make sure the matching rules are easier to “guess” than they are. As you suspect, they need exact “word matches” right now.
July 14th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
The offline storage of sensitive data thing is a great idea, but Google Gears only works with Firefox (and only with an optional extension). I’d recommend looking at the client-side database feature of the HTML 5 draft standard (http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/structured.html) — not only does it do pretty much the same as what you’re using Gears for, it’s already implemented in Safari for Mac, Windows, and iPhone/iPod touch as well as in Firefox 3… so more people on more platforms can use it without having to download Gears.
May 17th, 2009 at 10:29 am
Any news on implementing csv support for firebux?
July 16th, 2009 at 7:27 am
When will CSV files be supported in firebux?
December 9th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
Hey guys, any news on when Firebux will be available for Google Chrome?
June 13th, 2010 at 6:06 pm
Firebux doesn’t seem to work. I installed Firefox browser and installed Firebux. When through the recording process and saved the recording. Then tried the sync and it fails everytime.