I’ve been using mint.com for managing my finances since 2009.  It’s a terrific website for budgeting and visualizing how you spent your money.  I recently joined Tableau Software and wanted to employ the power of Tableau against my data.  The first step to doing this is to download my data into a file that Tableau can connect to.  This turns out to be pretty straight-forward thanks to work done by Mike Rooney. He built a Python module called mintapi to pull data from your mint.com account using screen scraping.

If you’ve never used Python before, there are a few extra steps to get it working.  Below are the steps for doing this on a Mac running Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite).

1. Install Homebrew.

Homebrew is a package manager for installing commonly-used software modules on Mac OS X.

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

2. Install the Homebrew-version of Python.

brew install python

Follow instructions in brew output.  Typically this will include statements like this:

pip install --upgrade pip setuptools
brew linkapps python

3. Install mintapi and requirements.

pip install mintapi
pip install pandas

4. Download transactions from mint.com.

Now you’re ready to download your data.

mintapi -t -u MINT-EMAIL-ADDRESS -f FILENAME

where MINT-EMAIL-ADDRESS is the email address you use to log in to mint (e.g. myname@gmail.com), and FILENAME is the name of the file to save the data.  The filename should end in .csv (e.g. mint.csv) to use with Tableau, although you can also specify a .json extension to get the data in JSON format.

To get help on the mintapi command, you can type the following command:

mintapi --help

That’s it.  Super simple.