How to set up for GLS Bank?

[devurandom]

I am a customer of GLS Bank. I have a VR-Kennung (serves the purpose of a username; numeric) and a password for my online banking account that I use to log into my bank's web site / online banking portal. I also have an old-style bank code (BLZ) and a modern-style BIC. I have several IBANs that I manage through this online banking account. According to https://www.gls.de/konten-karten/zahlungsverkehr/sepa-zahlungsverkehr/daten-zum-onlinebanking/ the endpoint is https://fints1.atruvia.de/cgi-bin/hbciservlet I tried entering the different numbers into different fields, but did not manage to get fints2ledger to work.

Using anything but the VR-Kennung as account in the config results in variations of what appears to be an authentication error -- in particular account does appear not be a bank account number. The farthest I got ended with "Exception: Could not find a matching account for account number '...'. Possible accounts: [SEPAAccount(iban=..., bic=..., accountnumber=..., subaccount=..., blz=...), ...]".

How do I set up to fints2ledger to be able to authenticate and fetch bank account transactions?

Would it be possible to make the setup process more convenient for my case, e.g. by asking me to enter the username (VR-Kennung), password and endpoint and then allow me to choose which BIC and IBAN to fetch data from, from the list of BICs and IBANs accessible to my online banking account?

[devurandom]

I inspected the code and found fints.selectedAccount (

fints2ledger/src/Config/YamlConfig.hs

Line 39 in 4b11041

, selectedAccount :: Maybe Text

) that I did not notice when following the instructions in the readme or when entering data into the TUI form.

I wrote ~/.config/fints2ledger/config.yml like:

fints:
  account: 'VR-Kennung'
  selectedAccount: 'old pre-SEPA / pre-IBAN bank account number'
  blz: 'old pre-SEPA bank code'
  endpoint: https://fints1.atruvia.de/cgi-bin/hbciservlet

When executing fints2ledger, I will be asked for the password interactively -- so I do not have to store it plain text in a configuration file. (Retrieving it from a password manager instead would be nice, see #44 .)

With that, fints2ledger appears to be able to get one step further. Now I got stuck with #43

[MoritzR]

Would it be possible to make the setup process more convenient for my case, e.g. by asking me to enter the username (VR-Kennung), password and endpoint and then allow me to choose which BIC and IBAN to fetch data from, from the list of BICs and IBANs accessible to my online banking account?

I think that is a good idea and possible.

It is definitely quite confusing right now. When I started this project the login and the actual account number to retrieve the transaction from where the same.
ING has since switched to a username/password authentication method, so even there having selectedAccount default to account does not make sense anymore. One is a username and one is an account number.

I will look into this, but updating to fints 5 is the priority #43 .