Robert Merkel responds to 10 questions from Slashdot
readers.
"Q. Would it be possible to incorporate some sort
of perl plugin to GnuCash that would go out to a bank's web site,
access the banking account information on the site, access the
relevant data and then format it in a way that could be pasted into
the existing GnuCash data?"
A. Banks generally provide machine-readable account information
in a couple of formats: QIF (Quicken Interchange Format), which is
an old and broken text export format used by just about every
personal finance program, and OFX (Online Financial Xchange), with
its first cousin QFX (Quicken Financial Xchange), which is an
SGML/XML protocol for both getting information and initiating
on-line banking activity such as funds transfers."
"If your bank provides downloadable QIF files, as many do, you
can import them into GnuCash easily right now. We are working on
the ability to use GnuCash's built-in web browser to log on to the
bank with SSL and download the QIF directly into GnuCash without
having to save to a file, but until then, it won't break your arm
to download with a normal browser and import the file into
GnuCash."
