Ability to import transactions
complete
Shawn Cao
complete
Hey folks, with the major software update at Fina.
You can now associate a Google Spreadsheet with any Fina account, either manual or live connection, the transactions from the sheet will be pumped into the system for you to analyze.
I personally think this is very flexible now from Fina's perspective, but I love to hear more of your feedback, I mark this as complete, but the conversation is still open. Let me know!
Eileen, not sure if you have chance to try out new page/block experience, you should be able to get merchant view easily with a page block now. Any more thoughts?
E
Eileen
I downloaded the transactions from my banking institution into a csv file, imported it into Google Sheets, and then modified the table of transactions to match the format in the Fina Transactions Template. I am not sure if people would want to do this kind of manual step on a regular basis. It would be nice if your tool could handle dates of the format mm/dd/yyyy in addition to yyyy-mm-dd. I exported the transactions from three banking institutions. They all used the format mm/dd/yyyy. I suppose that I need to record a macro to automate this reformatting of the transaction data into the format of your template.
Shawn Cao
Eileen makes sense.
Except this issue, overall is it easy to translate your exported data to the format defined by Fina Transactions Template?
E
Eileen
Shawn Cao, I suppose that if people manually reformat the transaction that they downloaded from their financial institution, they should have the technical ability to change the format of the date column. I wrote a script to reformat the exported data into the format of your template.
Shawn Cao
Eileen Thanks, amazingly you have that skill to do so.
I agreed, the date format should be auto detected, probably even better to have a more advanced config to do the translation. We will take this as a follow-up.
E
Eileen
Shawn Cao, the date format was not really a problem that would cause a person to not use Fina. The problem I ran into was that I could not see any way to customize the Transaction view to display the Merchant field (without drilling down by pressing the arrow/open icon). In Mint, this is displayed as a Description field. Your transaction view is displaying the account name. I could not figure out if there was any way to customize the report so that I could remove the account name and replace it with the Description field. I looked at your various template modules. I did not see support for budgeting. I also looked at the annual subscription fee for the various tools that your coworker surveyed:
Tiller - $79/yr, Rocket Money - $59/yr, Fina - $115/yr, Monarch - $99/yr, Copilot - $95/yr, YNAB - $99/yr, Kubera - $150/yr. Most of the other tools are less expensive than Fina. The question most people would ask is what does Fina offer that the cheaper tools do not offer.
Shawn Cao
Eileen Thanks for sharing the true insights with us, appreciate it.
I'm with you on displaying Merchant on the list, it's useful.
Now, you also mentioned pricing, I'm happy to discuss more on this. To briefly explain, here are the major difference:
- Fina is not just another app, it's a tool that you can build 100% of your own "views", flexibility is King.
- I admit that current template modules are pretty simple and even rough, because we are early on the road to a world of templates where you can discover and adopt all kinds of ways to track insights you're interested.
We are making flexibility to support people like you to customize things so that you can share your work with many others including your own way to set and track budgets. Think about app store for methodologies. If you are up to it, we can chat more, let me know.
I didn't mention a few cool features Fina has today that other apps won't have, and way more are upcoming:
1) multiple portfolio of accounts.
2) multiple snapshots for setup complete different tracking scheme.
3) set system currency to convert everything to that currency you like
4) (upcoming): metrics, formulas and tracking.
5) (upcoming): alerts, graphing and sharing.
6) (upcoming): publish your own templates and get adopted by others.
...
I appreciate all early supporters to enable us to build a complete different fintech tool to empower people to create and connect.
Shawn Cao
Eileen just to mention - Fina actually supports both formats, in your Spreadsheet, either
mm/dd/yyyy
or yyyy-mm-dd
for your date field should work, :)Shawn Cao
Hi Josh Dudley
In last release, we have put a lot of effort to improve how Fina works with Google spreadsheet, including but not limited:
- much easier navigation UI
- preview your spreadsheet content upon the connection.
- you can attach a spreadsheet to any account including a live account.
- new transaction sync button that you can use after you made changes in your spreadsheet.
I'm wondering if you and other voters could give it a try and let us know how it performs now, hope you like it!
Shawn Cao
in progress
Shawn Cao
Hi Josh Dudley, do you use Google Spreadsheet?
Fina supports manual account with a Google Spreadsheet attached for transactions, once you set it up, you can just simply update your Spreadsheet to maintain all manual transactions there lively.
Here is a tutorial video for that, could you please take a look and tell me if that works for you or not?
Looking forward to your further feedback!
J
Josh Dudley
Shawn Cao: Shawn thanks for the info. I actually kind of stumbled across this after I created this feature request.
Shawn Cao
Josh Dudley: Thanks for the quick update, Josh.
Does it work for you? I know there is a lot of polish work needed for "Manual Account" creation flow, just curious if you can share how you think about it, is it easy to understand and make it work, or not intuitive enough...
J
Josh Dudley
Shawn Cao: I am sure it will. I haven't tested it out yet. Apple Card let's you export via CSV monthly. So, I will download a month and import it to google sheets