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[Docs] - Automatic Transaction Import #2617
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Originally created by @createchange on GitHub (Nov 13, 2025).
Issue Type
Documentation Improvement
Description
Empower PER (formerly Personal Capital) was retired without notice, with users being forced over into their Empower RET application.
As they didn't see fit to send any advance notice, blackholed historical data, and didn't migrate any account links, I have no plans of investing any time to that end.
I came across this application, and saw the linked page: https://www.actualbudget.com/docs/transactions/importing.
It states:
I performed a
git blameand see this was added to the document >= 3 years ago.Is this feature actually coming soon? I am looking for a replacement application, but this functionality is a requirement for me. Just hoping to get some insight on roadmap / expected release of this functionality, as much of the benefit of these net worth / budgeting apps is the ability to forego logging into each and every account.
To make this request make more sense with the issue type selected - if the automatic sync is not coming soon, it may make sense to remove that verbiage from the documentation.
Thanks!
Documentation URL
https://www.actualbudget.com/docs/transactions/importing
Documentation Category
Accounts
Expected/Desired Content
Depends on the roadmap.
Screenshots or Examples
@jfdoming commented on GitHub (Nov 13, 2025):
Actual has a bank sync feature for North American banks that enables the kind of import you describe. It's not "automatic" but you have to click a single button inside the application to update. I think the docs are definitely worth clarifying
@createchange commented on GitHub (Nov 13, 2025):
That is useful information, thanks!
Do you happen to know if similar functionality exists for major brokerage firms (e.g. Fidelity, Schwab, etc.) and/or robo-investing companies (Wealthfront, namely)?
If so, that would be a more than acceptable option. I have no problem clicking to refresh - just don't want to have to pull and upload spreadsheets.
On another note, it turns out the perceived loss of connected accounts and historical data was inaccurate. The main issue is that I already have a retirement account. The old portfolio app redirects to the retirement app, which I already had installed and was logged into. Turns out, you can logout, and then the retirement app login flow accepts either set of credentials (retirement OR portfolio), and redirects you to the proper backend. Just an extremely clumsy implementation, made extra confusing by the fact the retirement platform also implements functionality for linking accounts, so when I was redirected I was loaded into the wrong account with zero accounts linked. Logging in with my portfolio credentials loaded everything up just fine.
A relief to not lose 8 years of historical data, but my desire to leave the platform has not been diminished. 😅
@youngcw commented on GitHub (Nov 13, 2025):
Check Simplefin for support of the institutions you want. They likely are supported
@voidranjer commented on GitHub (Nov 13, 2025):
Sorry to hear about your Empower PER incident!
I've spent the last couple of months playing around with ActualBudget and Firefly III, as I'm big on self-hosting and privacy.
After learning that these 3rd party "bank connector" services require full access to my online banking credentials in order to work properly, I've started working on making my own "exporter" software that runs fully offline because I refuse to trust third parties with my personal online banking credentials.
I've started this project: OpenBanker, which is a free and open source Chrome extension that parses the DOM of any website and exports transaction data, directly to ActualBudget, fully offline.
(We're currently working on a Canadian brokerage/investing company called Wealthsimple... Not quite Wealthfront. Sorry for not being able to give any information actually useful for your current predicament!)
It currently only supports a couple of Canadian banks, but I'm going to be working with a university student organization to make it as easy as possible for people to come up with plugins for their own banks.
The goal is for anyone to be able to write vanilla JS to traverse the DOM, scrape transaction data from online banking websites, load it into OpenBanker as a plugin and seamlessly export data into ActualBudget with 1 click.
The project is raw and documentation is lacking, but if this is something that might interest you, consider giving it a star :p
@createchange commented on GitHub (Nov 13, 2025):
@youngcw, I'll check out SimpleFIN, thanks for the recommendation! I actually had a productionized Plaid account with approved connections to some of my institutions, but they nixed my account - presumably because I am not a business user. Thankfully, it was before I started trying to develop against it.
@voidranjer, That looks like a nifty approach. Received a star from me! In full agreement on the privacy front - I'll be keeping an eye to see how the project progresses. Some additional scaffolding (and/or a decently tuned prompt) may allow folks to make use of LLMs and contribute back plugins for their own institutions.
@dojoca commented on GitHub (Dec 9, 2025):
I've built a locally hosted N8N workflow that uses local AI models, the actual-http-api code and curl commands to post transactions to my actualbudget. It's based on email notifications from the bank. I set the bank to email me for any transactions >$0.01.
It works beautifully now, but it was a challenge to get it right because the bank notifications sometimes are sent multiple times and other issues with the bank notifications being unpredictable in small ways.
I love that it's private, based on open source and free (except for my time and server costs). Just mentioning it in case someone else wanted to try this approach - I'd share my N8N workflow, but it's probably too bespoke to be useful in any generic way.