YNAB Messages Importer

My bank doesn't provide an API, however it does send an SMS for every transaction on my account. With a few regular expressions, we can turn it into data that we can import into YNAB.

Recieving SMS messages on your Mac

Presumably for privacy reasons, iOS doesn't allow apps to access SMS messages. To access them programmatically we have to use a Mac:

• Enable Text Message Forwarding on your iPhone: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208386
• Login to the Messages app on your Mac using the same Apple ID as your phone.

Example config

Create a file my-config.json with your relevant YNAB details:

{
    /* The private YNAB token from your account page */
    "ynab_token": "...",
    /* The name of your budget in YNAB */
    "budget_name": "My Budget",
    /* The YNAB account where the SMS transactions will be imported */
    "sms_account_name": "My YNAB bank account",
    /* The YNAB account where ATM withdrawals will be transfered */
    "cash_account_name": "My YNAB cash account",
}

Usage

$ npm install
$ node ./dist/sms-import.js my-config.json
Connecting to YNAB
Downloading transactions
Querying all SMS messages since 2019-01-10
Ready to import 4 transactions:
...

Successfully imported 2 transactions (2 duplicates)