Using BoA’s Aggregator feature for importing transactions from multiple sources into Money

AUTHORED BY Jon LARSSEN (djevel)
edits by ameridan

As more and more financial institutions are retiring their OFX servers, a companion solution to Pocketsense has been created, which allows for streamlined (and free of charge) downloading of checking, savings, and credit card account transactions and balances using BoA’s (Bank of America) My Financial Picture aggregator tool, along with subsequent conversion to the ofx file format for importing into Microsoft Money. The instructions assume that the user already has Pocketsense working using Python 2.7. These instructions and codebase have been written for, and tested on, Windows 10 and Windows 11 running Python 3.10 or 3.11 (other 3.X installations should work out of the box, but have not been explicitly tested).

Basic functionality involves manual download of two files from the Bank of America website prior to ofx conversion, whereas the advanced functionality provides a fully hands-off automated download and conversion process.

Requirements for basic functionality:

• A Bank of America or Merrill Edge (or possibly even Merrill Lynch – not tested) relationship. In other words you have to be (or willing to become) a Bank Of America customer in order to have access to the My Financial Picture aggregation tool.
• Willingness to use Bank of America’s aggregator partner (Yodlee/Envestnet) to sync external bank/credit card accounts.
• Python 3 installation. Pocketsense runs under python 2.7. The conversion script was written for python 3.X. Note that both 2.7 and 3.X can live harmoniously side by side, but to ensure that Pocksense is still executed using the Python 2.7 installation:
  

  ♦ after your Python 3.X install, right click on “getdata.py” (not the shortcut) ♦ choose “properties” ♦ “general” tab ♦ click “change” next to “opens with” ♦ navigate to and browse to your Python 2.7 “python.exe” executable (likely found @ “C:\python27\python.exe”).

  The My Financial Picture OFX converter python script and setup instructions/FAQ can be downloaded from his  Dropbox.

Additional requirements for advanced (browser automation) functionality:

• Google Chrome web browser
• Selenium installation for Python ► python -m pip install selenium
• Chrome webdriver download ► 64-bit Windows version: https://storage.googleapis.com/chrome-for-testing-public/122.0.6261.57/win64/chromedriver-win64.zip ► Extract the downloaded ZIP file and copy `chromedriver.exe` to a directory within your system’s PATH (I chose C:/Python27/Scripts/).
• Willingness to enter your Bank of America credentials into the provided python scripts.