OFX direct connect

I really like moneyGuru's focus on making hand-entry efficient. I've been looking at a lot of personal finance software lately, and many of them are focused on downloading data directly from banks, to the exclusion of making it easy (or possible) to enter data manually. This is a bug, not a feature.

Direct downloading strongly encourages users to trust their banks, and merchants. If users just wanted to know what their currently cleared balance is, they could check their banks' websites. One big reason I use personal finance software is to keep banks and merchants honest. By manually entering my transactions, and then checking them against the bank, I know that no one has made an error. I know not only what transactions have cleared, but what transaction have not cleared. The more certain I am about the expected future balance of my checking account, for example, the more money I can safely keep in a savings account, earning interest. Direct downloading might appear to save users time, but it encourages behavior that can cost them money.

Additionally, there are many technical issues with direct downloading. Many banks don't want to pay Quicken's fees, and so some "competitors" screen-scrape bank websites to get the data. OFX is much more complicated that QIF. Downloaded transactions need to be de-duplicated with manually entered ones using smart importing rules, as banks do silly things like putting payee names in all caps. New UI would be needed, and you would need to create and maintain a list of institutions that support downloading, and by what means, although it looks like OFX home has a list, which explains why iBank has three separate progress bars for downloading lists of OFX-compliant banks.