DirectConnect-y for YNAB

YNAB (http://www.youneedabudget.com/) is great budgeting software. However, by design it does not give you the convenience of automatically downloading and importing your financial data into the ledger. Official position from YNAB:

"We've found the direct connection to banks really pulls people away from their money (psychologically). We don't have any plans to add direct connect into the software--from a philosophical standpoint--as the further you are removed from your money, the easier it is to remove your money from you." (http://bit.ly/19oKTWW)

Unfortunately, not being able to automatically download my financial data makes the software a non-starter for me. Maybe for others too. I just am not that organized.

ynab_it uses Intuit's Customer Account Data API to aggregate financial institution accounts (banking, mortgage, credit cards, investments) transactions on disk and massages them into a format that YNAB can later ingest. So yes, there's still the manual import step but, thankfully, the distance traversed is only a few sectors on your drive.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'ynab_it'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install ynab_it

TODO: Use often, use wisely.