SMS PARSER CUSTOMIZATION FOR MOBILE APPLICATION "FINANCIAL MONITOR"
Common information
If you are user of application "Financial monitor", and you have bank card and you are receiving SMS from bank, you will be useful to know, that we have implemented functionality of automatic registration of operations by SMS from bank. SMS Reading will significantly reduce manual input and make your home bookkeeping more automated and easy. There are a lot of different banks and different types of SMS in the world, so on your part will be required specific actions. Yes, you will need to configure the parsers themselves, because we have no way to learn all SMS content and to create parsers, but we have tried to implement configuration as simple as possible and easy to user. In the future, working parsers will be installed automatically for users who receive SMS from the same banks.
Principle of the parser
The principle of the parser is based on obtaining the difference between the content of incoming SMS and the specific pattern. The pattern is created on the basis of already received SMS or set manually. All you need to do - is to highlight useful information in the text. No regular expressions and formulas. Everything is very simple. If problems still occur, you can send us an example of SMS to e-mail directly from the application. We will help you.
Setting up parsers
To work correctly, SMS message has to contain transaction amount, ID Card (normally 4 digits) and the purpose of payment. This is the minimum set of data that you have to obtain to create an operation in an application. In most cases, the SMS from the bank informs you about payment (expense), refill (income) or withdrawing cash (transfer). Similarly, we have implemented three types of SMS parsers that will create the appropriate operation. In the video we can see the whole process of setting up parser and key bindings to accounts and categories.
In order to determine in what specific account in the application to carry out an operation, you have to set unique key(card number) to account. This key must match exactly with the value in the SMS. You can set it on the account edit form or from the list of incoming SMS. The same applies to the keys for the categories. Only, unlike the account to one category, you can set multiple keys from the SMS. If you are creating a transaction from the list of incoming SMS, the category of SMS key will be automatically installed for the selected category.
In addition to major data (transaction amount, ID Card and the purpose of payment), SMS message may be contained additional information, which can help us at parsing SMS message. This data may be includes "Transaction type", "Currency", "Key of successful transaction" and "Key of failed transaction".
- "Transaction type" - ID of the type of operation in the SMS. The Bank usually indicate in a statement what kind of action was taken with your money. For example, when paying by card in the SMS will be the word "Payment", "Order" or similar. We need this key if we create multiple parsers to one bank.
- "Currency" - the currency in which the transaction occurred. This is usually three letters in uppercase, such as "USD", "EUR", or symbol "$", "€", "r". If the parser will find the currency, then, if necessary, the application will automatically perform the conversion.
- "Key of successful transaction" - sometimes SMS contains word, indicating that the transaction is successfully completed, such as "Completed", "Success". And unsuccessful transaction will be exactly the same but with a different word, or none at all.
- "Key of failed transaction" - key, which indicates that transaction is failed