There are lots of formats to store or read financial data; Salt Edge is supporting 3 most widely used: OFX, QIF and SWIFT.

Why are these formats so important?

• Open Financial Exchange (OFX). A data stream format for exchanging financial information that evolved from Microsoft’s Open Financial Connectivity (OFC) and Intuit’s Open Exchange file formats. Many US banks let customers automatically download their bank statements in the OFX format.
• Quicken Interchange Format (QIF). An open specification for reading and writing financial data to files. Most personal money management software, such as Microsoft Money, GnuCash, Quicken Personal and Quicken Personal Plus, can read QIF files to import users’ information.
• Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT). An industry standard for syntax in financial messages. Messages formatted to SWIFT standards can be read and processed by many well-known financial processing systems.

What does this mean for the open-source community? Now, any Ruby developer can use the salt-parser gem to extract data from financial statements.

Example:

require 'salt-parser'
require 'pp'

ofx = SaltParser::Ofx::Builder.new("spec/ofx/fixtures/v102.ofx").parser

account = ofx.accounts.first
pp "OFX account", account.to_hash

transaction = account.transactions.first
pp "OFX transaction", transaction.to_hash

###Other examples
qif = SaltParser::Qif::Builder.new("spec/qif/fixtures/bank_account.qif", "%d/%m/%Y").parser
pp "QIF account", qif.accounts.first.to_hash

swift = SaltParser::Swift::Builder.new("spec/swift/fixtures/sepa_mt9401.txt").parser
pp "SWIFT account", swift.accounts.first.to_hash

As for us, contributing to open-source is a helping hand towards a better digital world. Startups are using open-source as much as they can – to cut costs and build a community around their products. Now anyone can help you improve your bits of code.

Feel free to open new issues or feature requests on GitHub page and Salt Edge will improve its code.

Special thanks to:

• @annacruz ofx
• @jemmyw qif
• @betterplace swift

License MIT.

Also visit saltedge-examples if you want to integrate our API with your apps.

External links:

1. More information on the OFX specification
2. Original specification Qif
3. MT940 messages specification SWIFT