israel-finance-telegram-bot

When it comes to monitoring your expenses, different people have different methods. Some read the monthly-sent billing summary from each credit card provider / bank, some login to these services repeatedly to check if there’s something new. I prefer getting the expenses as phone notifications while I can still remember what the expense was for, not a month after.

When I was an Android owner I used to pay a (very cheap) subscription fee for an app called חיוב בטוח. This app was perfect for me - it scraped the credit card providers for new transactions and let me choose whether I approve / deny this transaction, so I can review those I denied when I have time. Using this method I found multiple subscriptions that I thought I cancelled and billings that were for the wrong amount.

But although I love this app, I can’t ignore my 3 problems with it:

• It only supports Android (I moved to iPhone and I don’t have this solution anymore)
• I don’t trust closed-source solutions I enter my credit card credentials into (how do I know it’s not being uploaded?)
• It doesn’t support bank accounts, only credit cards

Mainly because of the iPhone transition, I was left without a working solution. So I decided to develop one.

My solution is a small Telegram bot script that can run on your computer, scrapes the credit card and bank accounts (using the open-source Israeli Bank Scrapers project) and sends you notifications about new transactions using Telegram. It also supports “denying transactions” (marking them as denied so you can look into them later on). Most importantly - it’s open-source! So you don’t have to trust me your credentials aren’t being uploaded anywhere, you’re the one running the script on your computer and you can read the 1 file of source code yourself.

If you’re like me and need this solution - have a look at the project’s GitHub page: https://github.com/GuyLewin/israel-finance-telegram-bot