Thursday, August 27, 2009
In one of my earlier posts I announced the BAI to Excel Service for free. BAI to Excel web based application was our attempt to make a small dent in the universe of treasury workstations. Put simply; BAI To Excel is a web application by Treasury Sciences which allows you to turn messy and complicated BAI files into simple excel worksheets that you can analyze. If you would like to know more about the service you should click here. In another one of my post I also announced the fact that the API of this service are also now free for you to use. While announcing this service; I had brushed against the fact that the API should open up a whole lot of possibilities for folks who want to build custom applications around the BAI to Excel Service. BAI To Excel Desktop Client; who pre-beta version we are releasing today; is our attempt at showcasing the kind of applications that can be built by consuming the web service API. BAI to Excel Desktop Client is a cute looking application that sits quietly on your desktop and allows you to convert BAI files to excel files really quickly without having to go to the BAI to Excel website. 
You can either click the Add button on the application or drag and drop multiple BAI files into the application: 
Once the files have been added just press the 'covert' button and the program will convert each BAI file into a corresponding excel file. 
Once done you can either save each excel file you want in a desired location by clicking the save icon next to each file or you can click the "Save All" button and pick a folder where you would like to save all the converted excel files. You can use the same tool to add zip files which in turn contain the BAI files you want to convert. Doing this allows you to choose if you want to have all converted BAI files merge into one single Excel file or you want a separate excel file for each BAI file in the zip. You can pick this preference by click on the preference tab and picking the preference based on what you would like to have --- one single excel file for all BAI files or each BAI file having it's corresponding excel files. Note: The BAI to Excel client is built using Windows Presentation Foundation and .NET Framework 3.5. If you are running Windows Vista or above the application should just run out of the box. If however you are on an older operating system you may have to download .NET Framework 3.5 on your machine before you can run the client. You can get the .NET Framework 3.5 by clicking here. Since the BAI to Excel desktop application consumes the same web-service based API that we expose; it will require internet access each time you try to convert files using it. Also note that in order for this client to function you will have to change your preference and allow web service access to your BAI to Excel account. If you would like to know how to change this preference and enable web service access on your BAI to Excel account you can click here to find out more details. To access the application and start using it, you can begin by clicking here. As always; we would love hearing your ideas, opinions and feedback. If you have any comments or suggestions feel free to email me at rajiv@thousandtyone.com. Special thanks to Rohit Jain working on this Treasury Sciences Labs initiative; Amit Ghosh for giving it a beautiful user-interface and to Syed Khader for giving it QA cycles.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
We've been looking at the treasury space for more than a couple of years now and turns out, there is very little free goodness available out there. Most products seem fairly closed. Ranging from their features, to their screens, to their pricing - most companies out there seem fairly reluctant to discuss anything openly. What is even more discouraging is that unless you buy a treasury workstation from a specific vendor, there is very little value that vendor can add to your life as a cash analyst or a treasurer. In my previous post we announced the free BAI to Excel service. Making the BAI to Excel service free was our humble humble attempt to make a small dent in the universe of treasury workstations and add a little bit of value to your life as a treasurer even if you do not need a professional solution like CMO. A few folks have signed up for the service and have been trying it out. We have been talking to a few of those Beta signups and have been learning about how they would like to use the BAI to Excel service. Most organizations out there who are using this service because they want to quickly scan BAI files during the course of the day and see what the files contain. Obviously, it makes sense to see a corresponding excel version rather than a cryptic BAI file. For them, the BAI to Excel service through it's user interface works just fine. If your organization falls in this category and this is how you are (or plan on) using the BAI To Excel Service, the rest of this post may not apply to you. A few other organizations however, have decided to be a little more adventurous with the service and have plans of using it programmatically so that they can automate the translation from BAI to Excel by building their own custom scripts and tools around this service. We have been getting requests to make the BAI to excel service available programmatically primarily from folks who have in-house development teams and want to build small scripts or custom tools around this service. Classic cases that we have seen so far include: - Teams who want to write a script which automatically downloads the BAI files, converts them to excel, zips the excel files up and sends them to the cash analyst every morning without needing any user intervention. The befit of this of course is that the cash analyst gets a consolidated zip containing human readable excel files every morning.
- Teams who want to write scripts that get BAI files, convert them to excel and post these excel files on their banking services intranet websites. Benefit is having human readable excel reports on your intranet site instead of going to the bank site manually and trying to read cryptic BAI files.
- Teams who want to build small desktop based tools which access this service programmatically.
We have decided to listen to the folks who have been giving us feedback and have decided to open up the BAI to Excel API so that you can do all of the above with your own in-house development team. As of today, we are exposing the BAI to Excel API as a public, secured web service that anyone who signs up for the free BAI to Excel account can consume using his custom code or scripts. Going ahead, we will be working on building some sample tools around this web service to demonstrate how you can build your scripts and tools around this service. In this post however, let's just go ahead and talk about how you can activate this service so that you can consume it using your own code or scripts. To activate the service for programmatic access you will need to go through the standard registration process, which is completely free. Once registered and logged in to the BAI to Excel web application; start by clicking on the web service access hyperlink available in the header. 
Once in this screen you should be able to activate web service access to the BAI to Excel service by clicking the enable button. 
Clicking on the enable button should generate a security key for you: 
This should also give you access to view the web-service WSDL specification. You can use the "click here" link to see the web service WSDL which contains the specifications you will need to consume the web-service programmatically. The web service requires that you pass the security key each time you call it programmatically. 
We use the security key along with your user name to identify the request as a request coming from a valid user. Security keys are as confidential as passwords and should not be shared and distributed. With your username and security key you can consume the web service based API, send your BAI files to the web service and get an excel file back using your custom code or scripts. We are hoping that this will open up a whole lot of possibilities for folks who do not need a full blown treasury workstation yet and are just trying to build small tools or custom applications around BAI files. Going forward we will be building additional tools and services around the API and will be giving you examples of how you can consume the API and do custom development using the API. All of these sample tools that we build on this service will be released free of charge. The underlying service, as usual, is also going to be free as well. More free goodness to be announced soon. Stay tuned. We love hearing from you. If you like our services, please do continue to use them and spread the word. We would also love to hear how you are using our free services. Your feedback gives us an opportunity to improve the services based on your feedback. If you are facing problems with services, please do let us know. We would love to help. As always, Ideas, thoughts, suggestions are always welcome. Feel free to reach out to me at rajiv@treasurysciences.com.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
If you are a treasurer or a banker you probably work with BAI 2 files. Unless you have well established business relationships with the banks where you have your accounts, chances are, that you are downloading your BAI files by logging in to your bank’s website and grabbing a copy on a daily basis. How do you analyze these files? Unless you are a super hero or serious treasury professional who remembers the specification and every single BAI code off the top of your head, you probably struggle with these files as you try to make sense out of them. The BAI to Excel is a free service from the labs of Treasury Sciences. Put simply; if you are into banking, it is our humble attempt at making a small dent in your universe. All we are trying to do with this service is to try and make your struggle to understand BAI files a little easier. We do this by converting boring BAI files to easily readable and understandable; Excel file. You can sign up for this service for free and you can login using your newly created account. From that point on the service is simple; Stupid simple. All you do is --- you download the BAI files from your banks website, you upload them one at a time and for every BAI file that you upload, the system gives you a crisp, well formatted, easy to understand, human readable excel file back. 
The parser behind this free service that converts your BAI files to Excel is the same parser that powers our flag ship product CMO and processes thousands of transactions from seven top US banks on any given day. If you are a treasurer who is looking for an intelligent, web driven treasury workstation you might want to try out CMO. On the other hand, If you are someone who just wants to parse BAI files and analyze them on a file by file basis you should take a look at the free BAI to excel service and consider using it. You can try out the service here. We would like to hear from you. If there are any comments you have after trying out the service feel free to send them to me at rajiv@treasurysciences.com or leave us a comment on this blog. If you like the service and you know others who might want to use it, spread the word. If you don’t like it we would really like to hear from you on areas where we can improve. Send us your suggestion. Just in case you do not have a BAI file handy but you still want to try out the service, you can get a sample BAI file here. If you would like you see a sample copy of the output generated using the service before you signup you can get a sample Excel file here. More treasury goodness, fun tools, useful utilities and useful features to be announced soon. Stay tuned.
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