Personal expenses and bank sync

Personal is a private list of your own expenses. Nobody else sees it, not the other members of your groups and not the admin. It is in the bottom tab bar on a phone and the sidebar on a desktop.

#The ledger

Each expense has its own currency, whatever the currency of your groups, and is never converted. The top of the page shows this month's total by category, and the list below is grouped by month and shows 50 entries at a time, with a Load more button. Add, edit and delete work like in a group.

When you change an expense's category, a sheet lists your other expenses with the same description that sit under another category, so you can re-file them in one go. Untick any that don't belong.

#Folders

A folder is a project inside Personal: a trip, a renovation. Create one from Personal, and pick it in the expense sheet's Folder field to file an expense there. Each folder has its own page with its total, this month, its top categories and its last 6 months. Rename or delete it from that page. Deleting a folder keeps its expenses: they stay in Personal, out of any folder.

Split in a group takes a personal expense and adds it to one of your groups, paid by you and split equally between everyone. When its currency differs from the group's, it is converted at the European Central Bank's rate for its date (through Frankfurter). The personal expense is then marked Split in the group's name.

#Bank sync

Once you have set it up in Account, Bank sync (see below), you can link your own bank from Personal: pick a country and a bank, then confirm on the bank's own screen. Until then, Personal shows a pointer to that page. OpenCount never sees your bank credentials. The consent lasts 90 days, after which you link again.

Once a day the server fetches your booked debits and adds them to your personal ledger, categorized like any expense. The first sync goes back 90 days, later ones start 3 days before the previous one, and a transaction is never added twice. You get a notification when new ones arrive. Sync now fetches right away and Unlink stops the sync.

Delete an expense that came from your bank and it is hidden, so the next sync doesn't bring it back.

#Setting it up

Bank sync goes through Enable Banking, an open-banking provider covering most European banks, Revolut included. It is per account: everyone uses their own Enable Banking application, and the admin configures nothing. In Account, Bank sync:

1. Create an application in the Enable Banking control panel, in the production environment, with the redirect URL shown on the page.
2. Paste its application ID and the RSA private key it gave you. The key is stored encrypted, never sent back to the browser, and the pair is checked against Enable Banking before it is saved.

Turn off forgets your keys: linked banks stop syncing, and a link whose keys are gone fails with a message until you set them up again. The expenses already imported stay.

Enable Banking's free "restricted" use only works for accounts you linked to your application in its control panel, so your own bank accounts must be linked there first. A contract with Enable Banking lifts that. The server calls api.enablebanking.com for this, and only then. See Configuration.