Something like Mint or YNAB... which work great in the UK, but neither seem to connect to both UBS and SwissCard (and ideally UK and Italian banks)
I don't really care if it's cloud based or on my laptop; but it really does need to have the connection to the bank. Manually downloading and uploading files is a pain.
Any ideas if there's something out there?
I would never ever allow a third party software, especially if not Swiss, to connect to my Swiss bank account. And I am not sure Swiss banks would be so keen to that idea either, as there probably are many considerations around banking secrecy and I guess transferring such data outside of Switzerland.
But I am not saying this is impossible, I am just not aware of any such solution and I am not interested either personally.
(BTW: I know there is a business payment processing software that connects e.g. to UBS, but I think it's a very specific solution and I don't think there are many alternatives).
Based on your message, I would recommend a budgeting software that allows to import data, so you simply have to download a .csv file from UBS and that's it.
I personally don't trust any of those random (and even free!!) software with a detailed list of transactions, locations, saving rate, potentially even total assets, IBAN numbers, etc. I downloaded an XLS budgeting template from microsoft.com and spent a few hours making it my own. It works great and I can easily import data from my bank by downloading all transactions in cvs/xlsx.
UBS has signed up to the Open Banking standard it would appear. This allows you to connect in read-only mode, so that they can read transactions, but that's about it.
I've played with the UBS assistant, but it's features are useless compared to mint(USA) or snoop (UK). e.g.:
- analysis of recurrent transactions to identify subscriptions you may not be aware of (typically small things, like £3.95 a month - but had a few of these in the UK from things I stopped using LOOONG ago like goofbid).
- forecast of transactions (e.g. every year in October there is a large payment to the tax authorities, so it forecasts this for the upcoming year)
- automatic classification of transactions that can be tweaked (e.g. all international transactions in a specific week should be classified as "Holiday - Maldives"
- alerting of anomalous transactions (ok, UBS kinda has this too)
- bucketing - so I can say "this month, I want to spend no more than £2000 on aliexpress - alert me when I'm getting near to spending that
So far, I'm playing with Buxfer... does a bit, but the automated side is limited. I'm going to try YNAB and PocketSmith.
That last one seems promising as they don't just use Salt Edge to connect to UBS, but they support a few providers (Salt Edge, Akahu, Plaid, Basiq and Yodlee) - so the likelihood of them supporting SwissCard soon is higher...
EDIT: forgot to mention: I've played with excel, but dealing with accounts in 4 countries/currencies + properties (rental/expenses for these) just becomes a nightmare...
So far, my summary is:
Buxfer :
Cheapest, most manual categorisation. Relatively basic. Supports Salt Edge
Pocketsmith
Double the price of buxfer - but the categorization automation is the best. It even detects things like "Paypal *companyX 4798346" - and rather than categorizing it as paypay, it autocategorizes based on what "companyX" is. Also uses salt edge
Lunch money
Cleanest interface. The best it seems at identifying non-identical recurrent transactions (e.g. something that is 10usd/month will fluctuate on CHF, or things like water bills and petrol). That said, it uses plaid instead of salt edge - which I don't like.
Note: I don't like plaid as you would need to give it your bank credentials. I really dislike that, and won't be doing it. Salt edge uses the UBS Open Banking API, so you log into UBS and allow salt edge to read your transaction details.
I have a stream at end of month, where I download bank, credit card, Revolut, etc CSVs, take them through a short script for cleanups, and then upload manually.
With Buxfer remembering the format of the upload file for each account, and with leveraging rules, it takes me 30 min to update monthly and keep track of everything.
It works quite well, I don't think I have it in me to go with a different solution.
I don't care about syncing now that everything is set up, I also like to have some manual control and see what flows in and be sure that the numbers make sense.
Each bank can decide if they offer this or not, so I’m not aware of a single site that lists all banks that offer this. Short version, with PSD2 all EU banks will need to offer it.
That said - to save fintech companies time (and money), there are a few companies that take this API, and convert it into something more usable. They also keep up to date with changes in the headers (e.g. a bank may one month call the column a “Description” and the next update it to “Transaction Name”).
Salt Edge, Akahu, Plaid, Basiq and Yodlee all do this. I haven’t looked into all of them, but Salt Edge seems decent. Plaid I don’t like as you give them your credentials (which imo is as bad as writing a script yourself as saving the credentials in clear text).
Salt edge shows coverage here: