Expense Tracking Software with automatic sync to a Swiss Bank

Finance, Taxes, Banking, Insurance and Retirement
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There are a few expense tracking programs that claim to support automatic sync to some Swiss banks. Has anybody had any positive experience with automatic transaction sync on any expense tracker / Swiss bank combination?

I’m trying to make Postfinance syncing work with Buxfer, powered by SaltEdge. TLDR: it is unreliable to the point of unusability. Alternatives that claim to support Postfinance include Spendee and Toshl. There is also PocketSmith that claims to support some Swiss banks but not PF. Is any of them reliable?

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TLDR: it’s a collossal waste of time (at least with Postfinance). Stick with CSVs and homegrown conversion scripts.

Full version

Tried four apps that claim to support Postfinance: Buxfer, Toshl, Spendee and wallet by budgetbakers.

  • Toshl, Spendee and Wallet kinda work (Quite a few sync attempts fail with errors though)
  • Buxfer just doesn’t, got a few successful syncs out of it, but for two weeks it’s been “3 accounts synced, no new transactions downloaded”, which is false, because there are plenty of new transactions in those accounts. The support is responsive, quick to acknowledge my issues, but nothing changes.

I saw only a a few others that might work, powered by SaltEdge. Didn’t test them.

  • self-hosted Firefly III - don’t want to self-host
  • MoneyWiz 2024 - ios / macos app - don’t have a mac, prefer a web-based solution

The user experience for syncing a PF account looks the same in all of them, likely powered by some slow screen-scraping implemented by SaltEdge.

  1. You can’t automatically sync, you need to request a sync each time manually and login separately. There is no permission that lasts 3 months like with civilized banks from civilized countries.
  2. You click sync, wait 1-2 minutes type in your e-banking credentials (unless they are already stored), then wait some more, agree to the login in the PF app (or whatever 2nd factor you’re using).
  3. Then you wait 12-15 minutes for it to get your transactions.

When you do that you need to make sure that

  1. You don’t miss the call to authorize the login in the PF app. You actually have to sit in front of the phone and wait 3 minutes until it asks you for the login confirmation. If you miss it by more than a minute - you’re lost. You can do something else for the 15-mintue second step. Just don’t close the browser window.
  2. You’re not on a train or anywhere else where the connection may fail.

… because if you do, the connection will die and the sync will fail and 15 minutes will be lost. Buxfer additionally forces you to wait additional 15-20 minutes before you can even try to sync again. After two failed attempts it becomes clear that export, conversion and import would have been much faster and more reliable.

I have tried PocketSmith but it doesn’t support Postfinance, even though it does claim to work with 6 Swiss banks. Most of the other mainstream expense tracking or budgeting apps that you can find on Google such as the Intuit products or YNAB don’t work with Swiss banks at all.

There is also the whole Swiss accounting software industry but most of that is geared towards companies and priced accordingly. Those that claim to target private persons are Banana Buchhaltung, Kontor Shakehands and myprivate.ch. Didn’t try any of those as AFAICS they don’t even try to offer automatic synchronization. All websites are full of ad copy how easy and convenient it is to export a file from the bank and import it in the app. They might work without homegrown conversion scripts though.

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I’ve been using Buxfer for quite some time, and have been a paid subscriber for about 2 years now. I’m using a few banks/card providers, and my best process is to take exports with CSVs, run them through a couple of very simple scripts to clean them up, and then upload into buxfer. I spend maybe an hour a month doing that, including the time spent on tagging expenses to categories and doing the occasional clean-ups and reviews. Works reasonably well, and gives good overview of what I need to track. Thankfully Investment Brokers syncs automatically, so any investment portfolios don’t have to be replicated in the software, and that’s quite handy.

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