A few months back, we added the ability of using Google Gears to store your private data offline (i.e., on the hard disk of your computer) to provide secure and automatic synchronization with your bank.
Today, we have extended the support for our beloved Safari users as well. Safari v3.1+ users can store their authentication information locally within their browser, and synchronize their bank accounts without ever having to share their username/password with our server.
Safari users do NOT need to install Google Gears or any other extension, since Safari has added support for client-side database storage (conforming to the new HTML5 standard)
You can read more about secure synchronization via offline data storage here.
We have revamped a lot of our bank syncing code which should result in much more robust data retrieval from a number of banks. Many folks had encountered trouble with National City, Compass Bank, Key Bank and a few credit unions. Troubles with these banks should now be gone.
We have also added support for Capital One Credit Cards and PayPal in response to our vocal users. Enjoy! :)
We have added a few more banks to our list of supported banks.
ING Direct (USA)
E*Trade (banking and brokerage)
TD BankNorth
These have been the banks most requested by our users.
We have also made a few important performance enhancements which should significantly reduce memory consumption. This means much faster uploads and bank synchronizations for our users!
Enjoy! And keep the feedback flowing, as always!
Update: [July 1st, 2008] We have improved our support for Regions Bank, Sun Trust Bank and Citizens Bank. Please check it out and let us know if you still encounter difficulties.
Until now, we had a very restrictive format in which we accepted CSV files for import. This was a big pain not only because of the strict format, but because one would need to manually convert (into the format we required) a bank-downloaded CSV every single time one wanted to import.
Not anymore.
We now accept almost all formats for CSVs as long as each transaction line contains at least the following fields:
date, description and amount
Each line may also contain an optionaltag field.
These fields may occur in any order which we will try our best to identify. We will also try our best to get rid of the garbage that most banks like spewing in their CSV files. If we don’t succeed, we will ask you for help — only one time per account. So once you have set this up, future CSV imports into that account will all be achieved with a single click.
We 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.
Firebux is:
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
We believe in empowering the users to make choices that fit their financial needs, so whether you bank in the US or in India, whether you feel secure sharing your password or not, you can still have fully automatic account synchronization with Buxfer!
No its not an April Fools gimmick. We have added an easy way to synchronize all your bank and credit card accounts. Click on the ‘Synchronize all’ link you see on your account summary page, and you will see a list of your accounts that can be automatically synchronized. You can login to them all at once, and download all your new expenses in one go. You can use Google Gears to store these credentials offline on your computer, so next time you don’t even have to type in your username and password.
A few months back, we added the ability to automatically synchronize your financial accounts. However, it required you to type in your login details every single time you wanted to synchronize your data. It was hard work for the users, but a price had to be paid for security. It is our policy to never store sensitive user information in our database.
But today, we have achieved the best of both worlds. Your private data stays completely under your control, and yet you don’t need to type it out again and again!
Buxfer is now capable of using the Google Gears extension to store your private data offline, i.e., on the hard disk of your computer. Subject to your authorization, Buxfer can access data stored in your Google Gears database and authenticate you with your financial institution. You can delete this data or make it unavailable to Buxfer absolutely anytime you wish. After all, its stored right under your nose!
Google Gears is available for Firefox and Internet Explorer, and we highly recommend that you install it on your computer. For installation instructions, please visit the Google Gears website.
We are really glad to announce that Buxfer now supports “auto” downloading of your transactions from over 300 banks, credit unions and credit card institutions. Here’s the list of currently supported institutions:
As before, you will need to enter your bank / credit-card password every time you synchronize. We will NEVER store that password. It’s a trade-off between security and convenience we must have until we work out a smarter way.
This feature is currently in a BETA stage, so if you encounter any problems please let us know. Similarly, if your institution is not yet supported (especially for international users), please get in touch with us. We will soon be releasing support for syncing with international banks as well, so we sure wouldn’t mind some helpful early testers :)
Update: A few of our users have asked us how we obtain data from the financial institutions. For most of the institutions listed above, we use the Direct OFX Connect protocol used by Quicken, MS Money, MoneyDance and other desktop softwares. Note that this means that for some institutions (e.g., Chase banking, etc.), our users may need to explicitly enable (and sometimes, even pay for) “Quicken download”. That said, we are constantly working on improving this feature to remove some of these limitations.
Manually downloading statements from your bank accounts and uploading them to Buxfer is a chore. So, Buxfer now supports automatic synchronization of your Buxfer account with that of your financial institution.
Of course, security is the first and most important concern. All Buxfer does is download your statements from your bank (as if you were downloading them) and then uploads them to your Buxfer account. We do not store your username, password or any other sensitive financial data ever. As such, you will need to re-enter your password everytime you synchronize your account. We believe this is a reasonable trade-off at this stage between convenience and security.
This feature is in an early BETA phase; so we only support very few financial institutions right now: Bank of America, Citibank credit cards, US Bank and American Express credit cards. We hope to expand this rapidly to cover a wide range of financial institutions.
If you’d like your favorite financial institution to be supported soon, please contact us. The institutions which we support first will largely be determined by the requests we receive from our users. Also, if you are a programmer who has already written a “downloader script” for your bank, we’d love to incorporate it within our infrastructure if you so wish.
We have finally added support for multiple accounts and account balances within Buxfer. Now, you can segregate your expenses into different accounts - e.g., bank, credit-cards, etc. By default, all your expenses and incomes are logged into a “Cash account”. You can also move around transactions between various accounts to your heart’s wish. With each account, you can also see the associated balance (income - expense) which allows you to quickly understand how much money you have left in your coffers.
A thank you is in order for a lot of our patient users. This has been a feature demanded from quite some time. We apologize for taking so long to bring this feature to you. Hopefully, we will do a much better job from now on. So please keep your suggestions flooding in.
Buxfer is now capable of using the 
We have finally added support for multiple accounts and account balances within Buxfer. Now, you can segregate your expenses into different accounts - e.g., bank, credit-cards, etc. By default, all your expenses and incomes are logged into a “Cash account”. You can also move around transactions between various accounts to your heart’s wish. With each account, you can also see the associated balance (income - expense) which allows you to quickly understand how much money you have left in your coffers.
