Budgety Discuss

With Budgety, we've tried to make it as simple as possible to add transactions and track your spending. With the quick-add feature, mobile adding, text messaging and importing, it's very quick and easy to track everything! However, there's one more thing we could do to make it better.

There are quite a few services now that provide a direct connection to your bank. You supply your online banking username and password, and they connect for you, and automatically download your transactions without you having to do anything! That, we believe, is the next step for Budgety.

However, many people have security concerns with that. You're entrusting your banking credentials to someone else! You have to trust them completely for that to even begin to be feasible for you.

Here's my question to you. As we are working on an "OFX Direct Connect" feature for Budgety, what are some of the concerns or questions you might have regarding this. And will you use it when it's available?

Would like to see a OFX Direct Connect feature. Definitely will use it!

This is the main reason I haven't been able to use budgety as my main budget tool. mint has made this safe a so easy. Very glad you are working on this.

We're looking at initially supporting just over 200 banks. As you request access to your particular bank, we'll work with you to get them added, but can't guarantee that a specific bank will ever be available.

Because of the nature of OFX Direct Connections, there's three pieces of information that we'll need to make a bank available:

1. FI ID (Usually an identification number)
2. FI Org (Usually a short character code)
3. FI Url (A regular web address)

This means that the bank has to have a special "OFX Server". Most banks have this server, but it's up to the individual bank to decide if they want us to have access.

I am not comfortable about the amt of info I have on line with budgety right now. I use this tool because it was the ONLY one that did not want all my bank information before I could use the site. I like budgety very much.

Linda, we definitely will keep all of the Budgety tools intact how they are! I definitely agree that there are people who will not feel comfortable entering their bank information into a website! Thank you for bringing that point up!

We will not require users to enter their bank information, it will just be an added (easier) way for users to get their transactions into Budgety.

I'm also NOT comfortable with any automatic connecting to my bank account. I will more than likely NOT use the feature when added.

I agree with Linda, I'm using this tool because it did not ask me for my bank information.

I REALLY like the fact that I can import the bank transactions from a file sitting on my hard drive. Please keep that functionality in place (importing from a file on the users computer.)

Cynthia, that functionality will definitely stay in place. That's one of the reasons I didn't use some of the other offerings out there and opted to build my own.

I would embrace this feature, were it added. However, british banks seem to have incredibly poor support for OFX Direct Connect. Once our banks have caught up with the modern world, then I will make use of it.

Lewis, many banks are far behind when it comes to OFX support, as I'm finding out. Banks are much harder to work with than I originally anticipated. But we're still plugging away at this feature!

Most of the code has been written, re-written and perfected and we're pleased with the result. However, getting banks to actually allow us access to their OFX server has been proving difficult. We're moving forward though!

Thanks for the update. I am now a subscriber to Budgety and OFX Direct Connect with my banks would massively improve my experience.