He said in this video that he used SendKeys to simulate keystrokes to a browser.  His code probably looks like below.  He has shown this technique in past forum posts, but always with the caveat about the unreliability of this method.  He also considers SendKeys to be one of the Evil Access Stuff that is to be avoided if possible.

Below is a sample code that automatically opens this website and types a search text in the search box:


Public Declare PtrSafe Sub Sleep Lib "kernel32" (ByVal dwMilliseconds As Long)

Sub TestAutomation()
    ' 10/26/26 created for 599cd.com
    Dim i As Integer
    FollowHyperlink "https://599cd.com"
    Sleep 2000
    AppActivate "Mozilla Firefox"   ' Or "Edge" or "Google Chrome"
    For i = 1 To 24
        SendKeys "{tab}"
    Next i
    SendKeys "Search text"
End Sub


Sending keystrokes like this requires precise order and timing, which could be thrown off by Internet speed, webpage loading time, and things of that nature.  The bigger and more complex the task, the greater the risk of incorrect data entry, which you want to avoid on critical websites such as banking sites.  It may work for short tasks; but then again, you may as well do the jobs manually if they are short.

Yeah, that's very similar to what I do.

I AppActivate the browser after I've logged in first, obviously. Automating a browser login to a secure site like a bank or credit card company is difficult, and I wouldn't recommend it. Since I've got passkeys for most things, logging in is usually just touching my fingerprint reader.

Once I'm logged in and on the page showing my balances and transactions, I use SendKeys to send a Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C to the browser window to copy the page text to the clipboard. Once it's in the clipboard, Access can take it from there. I send the unformatted text to OpenAI with a prompt that basically says, "Organize this crap." It turns the jumbled mess into XML, which I can then parse through.

The difficult part is that every website has its own format. Text is over here, numbers are over there, and trying to write VBA that handles every possible site is very fragile. As soon as they change something, it breaks. Sending the text to AI and telling it exactly what I need has been doing a really, really good job of formatting it properly.

If enough people are interested, I'll put together a video.

I've also done the Ctrl-A Ctrl-C thing on the IMDb website for my movie collection database.  Some of the info on IMDb cannot be scraped, and only exists on a fully-loaded page because of the dynamic nature of the underlying code.  Hence, copying the loaded page's content with Ctrl-C is the only way to capture all the info.  I paste the copied info to Excel as HTML, preserving all the hyperlinks because I need them.  Then I use Excel VBA to parse all the hyperlinks and text and arrange them in a table-like format, from which Access VBA imports the data into my database.  

No one but ourselves is going to do this for us because not many people use Access.  If you are looking for 100% hands-off automation as you seem to be, that may be even harder to find.  They probably exist, mostly likely for enterprise-level services, and most likely not available for Access.

Yep, that's basically it. I may do a video on it, although I want to make it clear that it isn't fully hands-off automation. You still log in and navigate to the appropriate page yourself. Then the automation just copies the displayed page text, and AI turns that jumbled text into something my Access database can use.

There are enterprise-level products that can pull financial data automatically, but I'm not looking to go that far. I just want something that can check my balances, grab the latest transactions, and put them in my Access database.

Right now, I do it manually once or twice a week. The SendKeys trick gets it down to maybe 10 to 15 minutes instead of copying and pasting, typing everything in, or downloading CSV and QuickBooks files. I still download those around tax time, of course. For regular balance checking, this is manageable.

The toughest part was trying to write scripts that could handle every institution's screen format. Some include dollar signs, some don't. Some put pending amounts above the balance, others below it. Trying to write VBA that says, "Find this text, then grab all of the numbers between here and there," gets fragile fast because every institution does it differently.

That's where AI really shines. I just grab the displayed text - no HTML needed - and tell it, "Format this for me." It's remarkably good at taking that jumbled information and organizing it into a consistent format that I can parse and import.

When I get some extra time, one of the things I want to do is install one of the open-source local AI models, like Ollama or something similar. I know a lot of people are understandably wary of sending sensitive financial information up to the cloud.

Personally, I don't care. If OpenAI cares that I spent $34 at Texas Roadhouse last week, that's not a problem for me. LOL.