Hi,

I'm using Actual Budget and I connected my company's bank account (wich is on someone's name) with it to sync all transactions.

From a privacy perspective, I share your concerns. This was the reason I haven't connected any of my personal accounts.

The sync in itself is useful, but if you're making a routine to add an entry in Actual everytime you're making a purchase, you'll get the most of it without trading your privacy.

I just set it up. Yes i dislike the fact, that you need another party for syncing it, but i doubt it would be possible otherwise, just too much work to support everyone.

I read up on GoCardless and they do not sound that evil

But not sure if i will keep the connection up. Will see i guess.

It doesn’t help our friends in the EU, but I’m hopeful that the CFPB’s “Open Banking” rules might actually make it possible to do this with an open source product with OAuth and common APIs rather than these aggregators that are just web scraping your bank.

I use Hibiscus for all my banking needs.Makes a direct connection to my bank. Will get you the link if there is interest when I am back home.

I have a friend that uses the Go Cardless for importing data into FireFlyIII for several months now (May at least six) https://docs.firefly-iii.org/tutorials/data-importer/gocardless/ - Happy to put you in touch if you want to talk to them. - I'd actually like to find a UK Credit Union that would support data import for Selfhosted people. I think there would a really good fit. I'm also on day one of using YunoHost to spin up self hosted applications (Today on a VPS tomorrow on my local RaspberryPi ) I might fire up an instance of Actual.

I'd love to know how many people use Actual / Firefly to demonstrate that there would be interest for a Credit Union to look at offering such a service.

I do. I find it very useful.

Is it safe? No idea, but its read only, so seems that they cannot operate on your bank account in any case. That feels safe enough for me.