PocketBooks - Money Manager API integration & OpenData services

Manual ledger, structured value

Unlike an aggregator app that mirrors a bank feed, PocketBooks holds intentional, user-tagged data: each row already has a category, an account label and an optional note. That makes the export ideal for behavioural analytics, micro-segmentation and "true cost of life" calculations where bank-feed data is too noisy.

Cross-border friendly

The app supports multiple currencies natively, so users in MENA, South Asia and the EU all sit in the same dataset. A single normalized API on top removes the currency conversion work for SaaS, neobanks and family-finance products that want to onboard global users.

Backup-first design

PocketBooks ships with Google Drive and on-device backup. We treat that backup as the canonical export channel: with the user's authorization we parse the backup, project it into a stable schema, and stream changes via webhooks — no fragile screen-scraping required.

1. Authorization & user binding

OAuth-style consent flow on top of Google Drive backup access (or local backup file upload). Issues a per-user access_token scoped to read transactions, categories and budgets only — write access is opt-in. Use case: onboard a PocketBooks user into your accounting SaaS in under 60 seconds.

2. Transaction history API

Endpoint GET /v1/pocketbooks/transactions with date range, account, category and currency filters. Returns paginated JSON with amount, currency, category_id, account_id, note, booked_at. Use case: nightly reconciliation against an external bank statement feed.

3. Category & budget sync

Reads the full category tree and active budgets, including limit, period and rollover. Use case: pre-populate a corporate spend-management workspace with the user's existing personal taxonomy so they keep one mental model across personal and work expenses.

4. Multi-currency reporting

Normalizes mixed-currency entries (e.g. AED, USD, INR, EUR) to a single reporting currency using booking-date FX rates. Use case: a global travel-expense module that wants every receipt expressed in the corporate base currency without re-asking the user.

5. Google Drive backup ingestion

Parses the encrypted/cleartext PocketBooks backup the user already creates. Detects new restore points, diffs against the previous snapshot and emits change events. Use case: keep a passive copy of a user's ledger inside your data warehouse without ever touching the running app.

6. Export to OFX / QIF / CSV / Excel

Generates standards-compliant exports for QuickBooks, Xero, GnuCash, Excel and Google Sheets pipelines. Use case: a tax accountant ingests a client's full year of PocketBooks data in QIF without typing a single transaction.

A. Tax filing & bookkeeping pre-fill

An online tax service onboards self-employed users who already log every receipt inside PocketBooks. Our /transactions endpoint streams 12 months of categorized expenses; the tax tool maps PocketBooks categories to deductible buckets and pre-fills Schedule C / equivalent forms.

Data involved: transactions, categories, accounts. OpenFinance mapping: consent-scoped read of personal expense ledger, equivalent in spirit to PSD2 AISP for self-reported data.

B. Family / couple budget app

A shared-wallet app (Goodbudget / Honeydue style) lets one partner connect their PocketBooks ledger so the household sees a single combined view. We sync the category tree and active budgets so the existing labels survive the merge.

Data involved: categories, budget envelopes, balances. OpenData mapping: portable user-owned budget data; user remains controller, our API is the conduit.

C. Travel-expense normalization

A travel-tech platform onboards users from MENA, India and Europe. Receipts logged in AED, INR, EUR are pulled via the multi-currency endpoint and converted to USD at booking-date FX so corporate dashboards stay clean.

Data involved: transactions, currencies, accounts. OpenFinance mapping: cross-border data normalization equivalent to SWIFT-style reporting on a personal scale.

D. Personal finance coaching & AI

An AI coach reads the user's last 90 days of categorized spend and recurring patterns, then suggests envelope adjustments. Our derived "spending insights" feed avoids re-running aggregations on the client.

Data involved: transactions, derived monthly totals, recurring detection. OpenData mapping: read-only personal data feed for explainable financial coaching.

E. Migration / consolidation tool

A user is moving from PocketBooks to an OpenBanking-connected app such as Wallet by BudgetBakers, Spendee or Actual Budget. We parse the Google Drive backup once, emit OFX / QIF / CSV, and the destination ingests it natively — without manual re-entry.

Data involved: full backup snapshot. OpenData mapping: classic data portability use case (GDPR Art. 20 in spirit).

1. Consent & user binding

POST /v1/pocketbooks/consent
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "user_ref": "client-internal-uid-1029",
  "scopes": ["transactions:read", "budgets:read", "categories:read"],
  "backup_source": "google_drive",
  "redirect_uri": "https://your.app/oauth/callback"
}

200 OK
{
  "consent_id": "cn_8e2c...",
  "authorize_url": "https://api.example.com/auth?cn=cn_8e2c...",
  "expires_in": 600
}

2. Paginated transactions

GET /v1/pocketbooks/transactions?from=2026-01-01&to=2026-04-30&cursor=
Authorization: Bearer <ACCESS_TOKEN>

200 OK
{
  "items": [
    {
      "id": "tx_01HX...",
      "booked_at": "2026-04-12",
      "amount": -42.50,
      "currency": "EUR",
      "account_id": "acc_main",
      "category_id": "cat_food_dining",
      "note": "lunch with team",
      "type": "expense"
    }
  ],
  "next_cursor": "eyJvZmZzZXQiOjUwMH0=",
  "has_more": true
}

3. Backup webhook (change feed)

POST https://your.app/hooks/pocketbooks
X-Signature: sha256=...

{
  "event": "backup.snapshot.ingested",
  "user_ref": "client-internal-uid-1029",
  "snapshot_id": "snp_2026_04_28",
  "added": 17,
  "updated": 3,
  "deleted": 0,
  "currency_breakdown": { "EUR": 12, "USD": 5, "AED": 3 }
}

# Recommended handling:
# 1. verify HMAC X-Signature
# 2. enqueue a delta pull via /v1/pocketbooks/transactions?since_snapshot=snp_2026_04_28
# 3. idempotent upsert keyed by tx.id

4. Error handling & auth refresh

// 401 token_expired -> refresh
POST /v1/oauth/refresh
{ "refresh_token": "rt_..." } -> { "access_token": "..." }

// 409 backup_locked -> wait + retry
// 429 rate_limited  -> honor Retry-After header
// 422 schema_drift  -> fall back to raw_row passthrough,
//                       flag for manual review,
//                       do NOT silently drop rows

Source-code package (from $300)

• OpenAPI / Swagger spec for every endpoint above
• Runnable Python and Node.js reference implementation
• Backup parser (Google Drive + local file) with test fixtures
• Postman collection and sample .env for sandbox
• Engineering report: protocol analysis & data-model mapping

Hosted pay-per-call API

• No upfront fee — billed per successful API call
• Multi-tenant token issuance with scope control
• Webhook delivery with retry & dead-letter queue
• Per-user audit log of read events
• Region-pinned data plane on request (EU / Asia)

Documentation & tests

• Endpoint reference, error catalogue, retry guidance
• Schema mapping: PocketBooks rows → OpenData fields
• Integration test suite (pytest / jest) hitting sandbox
• OFX / QIF / CSV / Excel export validators
• Compliance & privacy notes (see next section)

Regulatory framing

PocketBooks - Money Manager is not a regulated financial institution; the app stores user-entered ledger data on the device with optional Google Drive backup. Our integration treats that data as personal data under GDPR (EU) and the equivalent regimes in MENA and South Asia. Where customers operate in EU/UK markets, we align consent and data-portability flows with the spirit of PSD2 AISP and the UK Open Banking consent model — even though no direct bank link is involved.

What that means in practice

• Read-only by default; write scopes are opt-in.
• Explicit, time-bound user consent stored alongside every token.
• Data minimization: only fields requested by the customer are surfaced.
• Right-to-erasure endpoint that wipes both warehouse rows and backup caches.
• HMAC-signed webhooks; mutual TLS available on enterprise plans.

Money Manager (Realbyte)

One of the most popular Android double-entry expense trackers. Holds transactions, accounts and assets. Users moving between Realbyte's Money Manager and PocketBooks frequently need a unified ledger export across both.

Wallet by BudgetBakers

Bank-sync first, with strong category and budget tooling. Households often pair Wallet (for bank-feed accuracy) with PocketBooks (for cash and manual entries) and want a merged transaction view downstream.

Spendee

Multi-account, multi-currency budgeter with shared wallets and a receipt scanner. Users coming from Spendee bring a similar data shape (transactions, categories, budgets) which maps cleanly onto our PocketBooks schema.

Goodbudget

Envelope-method budgeting for couples and families. Goodbudget envelopes line up with PocketBooks budgets, so a single OpenData feed can power a shared household dashboard across both.

EveryDollar

Zero-based budgeting tool from the Ramsey ecosystem. Users sometimes log day-to-day spend in PocketBooks and bring monthly totals into EveryDollar; a category-mapped export makes this trivial.

Monarch Money

Subscription net-worth and budgeting suite with investment dashboards. Pairs naturally with a PocketBooks export for users who want the granular cash-spend log inside Monarch's broader picture.

Rocket Money

Subscription tracking, bill negotiation and auto-categorization. Often used alongside a manual ledger like PocketBooks; a combined feed surfaces both linked-account spend and untracked cash spend.

PocketGuard

"In My Pocket" headroom view on top of bank-feed data. Combining its bank-derived numbers with PocketBooks' manual entries gives a more honest picture of disposable income.

Mint (legacy) / Actual Budget

Mint users displaced by its 2024 sunset migrated to tools like Actual Budget, which imports OFX / QIF / CSV. Our PocketBooks exporter emits exactly those formats, making consolidation straightforward.

Beyond Budget & Honeydue

Beyond Budget supports OFX/QIF/CSV import; Honeydue focuses on couples' shared finances. Both are common downstream destinations for a PocketBooks export, particularly for couples and freelancers.

About our studio

We are an independent technical service studio focused on App interface integration and authorized API integration. Our engineers come from fintech, payments and protocol-analysis backgrounds, and we ship end-to-end OpenData and OpenFinance pipelines for Android and iOS apps across financial, e-commerce, travel and social verticals.

• Protocol analysis, interface refactoring and Open Data integration
• Authorized third-party interface integration and authorization protocol analysis
• Automated data scripting and delivery of full interface documentation
• Two engagement models — source-code delivery from $300, or pay-per-call hosted API
• Pay after delivery upon satisfaction on the source-code track

Contact

Send us the target app name and concrete requirements (e.g. "PocketBooks transaction export + budget sync, hosted API, EU region"). We respond with a scoped quote and timeline.

Open contact page

NDAs available on request. Sandbox credentials provided after scoping.

Engagement workflow

1. Scope confirmation: target endpoints, regions, hosting model (1 business day).
2. Protocol analysis & backup-format mapping (2–4 business days).
3. Build & internal validation against fixture backups (3–6 business days).
4. Documentation, test suite and OpenAPI spec (1–2 business days).
5. Handover, sandbox access, and a one-week post-delivery support window.
6. Typical first delivery: 5–12 business days end to end.

FAQ

What do you need from us to start?

Do you ever bypass app security?

How is pricing structured?

Can you host the API for us?