An App - Scottbalance

Scottbalance (portfolio link) is a tiny app with a simple role. It saves a daily history of your Scottrade account balance and emails it to you - automatically.

Why this app?

I have an account with Scottrade where I invest in stocks. Scottrade does not include a feature to view your historical balances. It only shows your current day's balance. Scottrade does not provide an API to gather said historical balances either. I needed to be able to get a hold of my historical balances, so I built Scottbalance.com.

How does it work?

Using your Scottrade login information, the app screen scrapes your latest current balance and saves that information to your balance history. (Your login information is securely encrypted). After saving it, it emails you to let you know your latest balance for that day. Then by logging in you can see a list of your historical balances.

Additionally, the app is smart enough to navigate through Scottrade's new security questions. And the app is designed to look good on your iphone so you can check your balances on the go.

Libraries and Tools Used

The app is hosted on heroku. It is built on Padrino. It uses bcrypt to encrypt all Scottrade access information. It uses warden to handle user authentication. For the automatic logging into Scottrade and for the screenscraping of the balances it uses mechanize.

Conclusion

This was a personal project so it's certainly not polished but it does its job well. So I decided to make it available to everyone. If you also have a Scottrade account, then try it out and see what you think. It's free to use.

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