In addition to my "how many backups can one man run in a single day" adventure this weekend, I also spent some time experimenting with one of those online financial aggregator services, and I have to say, I'm pretty impressed with how well it works so far.

Up until now, checking my balances meant logging into every bank and every credit card site individually. American Express, Capital One, Discover, Local Bank, several others. I usually do that a few times a week just to make sure everything looks sane. It works, but it's tedious, and it's exactly the kind of repetitive task a computer should be handling for me.

With one of these aggregator services in place, I can now check all of my balances in a matter of minutes without logging into each site. Obviously, if you want to actually make a transaction, you still go to the bank's website. But for balance checks and general monitoring, this is a massive time saver.

The setup is fairly straightforward. You create an account, connect it to your financial institutions, and let it do its thing. I was able to connect to all of my major accounts without much trouble. Most of the big banks and credit card companies are supported. You might run into the occasional fringe service that isn't, but for the accounts I actually use day to day, it worked very well. (1)

Once everything's connected, the service automatically updates your balances and transactions once or twice a day. Each morning, all I have to do is open an Excel spreadsheet it generates, click an update button, and it pulls all the latest data down. The important part here is that the data lives in a local Excel file on your computer. It's not trapped inside someone else's app or website. You own the data.

And of course, once the data's in Excel, pulling it into Microsoft Access is trivial. I spent a few hours on Saturday wiring my Account Balances Template to the spreadsheet, and now importing balances is basically a two-step operation.

The workflow is simple: 1. open Excel, click update, save the file. 2. open Access, click import. Done.

Tracking actual transactions takes a little more effort, but that's something I only do a few times a year anyway. Now that it's easier, I may just fold it into my regular routine. And it could be part of the same workflow. Once the coding is done, it will be seamless.

I'm still tweaking a few things and squashing some minor bugs, but overall I'm very happy with the results so far. If this is something you'd like to see in more detail, let me know and post a comment below. Once everything's fully polished, I'd be happy to put together a full video series (probably a seminar) showing exactly how this setup works and how I'm pulling the data into Access.

Computer: quietly doing the boring stuff in the background so I don't have to. Exactly as it should be.

LLAP
RR

(1) I'll share which service I'm using right now because I'm actually testing a couple of them and I don't want to have anyone rush out and setup and account until I've vetted it 100% first. Then I'll give my recommendation. You know me - I don't endorse it unless I use it myself, or love it.