Importing Transactions into Mint

Mint is a very nice financial management tool. Unfortunately it lacks an important feature, the ability to import transaction information from a text file. If your financial institution is not supported or if you just want to input a bunch of old transactions you are pretty much screwed, since the only option is to it manually through the UI. Like every good programmer I'm extremely lazy, so there was no way I was going to spend hours and hours mechanically clicking buttons. It took me sometime but I created a way to automate it. It's hacky and ugly, since I put it all together in less than 2 hours, but it works and saved me some time, so I thought I would share it with you guys.

Since the data inputing can only be done though the UI I turned my head to Browser UI Automation. A quick search on stack overflow turned up Selenium, an open source suite of software to record and run Browser UI test cases. It is composed of:

1. A java server that automates Firefox and can run test cases.
2. A .Net library that can can communicate with the server, thus automating Firefox from C#. (There are libraries for numerous other languages as well, from Java to Ruby)
3. A Firefox plugin, that you can use to record a set of browser actions as a test case. It can also export the test case as C# code that uses the library from above.

I came up with the follow strategy to use Selenium to solve my problem:

1. Record a Selenium test case of me logging into mint and then creating a transaction. I needed to install the Selenium Firefox plugin before doing that.
2. Export the test case as C# code.
3. Modify the Selenium code so that the mint user name and password are received as parameters and the transaction create code is in a loop that runs multiple times.
4. Create a VSTO Excel spreadsheet and embed the Selenium code in it. Add references to it to the Selenium assemblies. Have cells for the username, password and data to be imported into Mint. Have a button that calls code that instantiate the selenium test case class and runs it.

To use the spreadsheet you should do the following:

Prereqs:

1. Firefox 3.x with the Selenium Firefox plugin installed.
2. .NET framework 4.0
3. Excel 2010 (Excel 2007 should work as well but I have not tested it.)
   

Procedure:

1. Install the spreadsheet, clicking on setup.exe
   
2. Open the spreadsheet and fill the username and password.
3. Paste the transaction data. The columns here are transaction date, name, category and amount. The values here MUST be exactly what you would type into mint, or else all hell will break loose. The only exception is the date field. If Excel recognizes it as a date, it will work. Notice that this probably mean that you will have to massage you data somewhat.
4. Open the selenium server. Its a Java executable called "selenium-server", on the same folder as the spreadheet
   
5. Click run

The you just have to sit back and watch the thing run. It is not that fast, It creates about a transaction per second or a bit less, but that sure beats entering them manually. I've also seen a selenium call fail for no good reason. If this happens use the Firefox window to look at Mint and figure out the transaction that was being created when the failure happened and restart the process from that transaction.

Here's the "executable". It includes the Excel spreadsheet and everything you need to run it including the selenium-server and dlls, bur excluding the prereqs noted above.

And here's the source code. Once again, includes all the dependencies.

Let me know if you find it useful! :-)

David

Update 1: Updated the executable file with a properly "published" xlsx file. The older file would not run because of security problems.