beancount-reds-importers 0.4

Importers for various institutions for Beancount

beancount_reds_importers

Simple importers and tools for beancount.

For a comprehensive look at writing importers, see The Five Minute Ledger Update.

Importers can be ugly and painful to write, yet are important in automating the grunt work out of maintaining personal finance software. The philosophy is to make writing importers easy. To achieve this, the design goal is to separate importers in to three parts:

1. file format reader (reusable)
2. transaction builder (reusable)
3. institution-specific declarations and code (minimal, institution specific)

This helps move common code into (1) and (2) above, and makes writing new importers easy by sipmly picking from one of those two along with with minimal declarations and code in (3).

File format readers included are:

• ofx
• csv (single and multitable support)
• xlsx (single and multitable support)

Transaction builders included are:

• banking (for banks and credit cards, which benefit from a postings predictor like smart_importer
• investments/brokerages (to handle the very many distinct cases of investment related transactions)
• paychecks (to handle paychecks, which typically contain very many pre-determined postings in a single entry)

Input in ofx format (over csv) minimizes data and coding errors, eliminates format breaking changes in csv, and typically includes balances that are used to generate balance assertions, and commodity prices.

Look inside the importers/ directory to see a list of institutions supported. More investment, credit card, and banking institutions will be added in the future. Contributions welcome.

Installation

pip install beancount-reds-importers

If you plan on importing excel files, also run: pip install openpyxl

Running

1. Create your own my.import. An example my.import is provided. At the least, include your account numbers
2. Include fund information. Copy the included fund_info.py to start with.
3. You can now run bean-identify, bean-extract, etc. See the included script: Run ./import.sh <your_input_ofx>
4. If cusip info is missing, the importer will let you know. Add it to your fund_info.py

Testing

I run tests across hundreds of actual ofx and csv files, against reference outputs that I know to be correct from my personal file. However, I'm unable to share them since these are personal. Testing against real world files is best, so I recommend you do this with your own input files. Having said that, Unit tests are probably useful, even if limited, and I'll add these shortly (contributions welcome).

Contributions

Test ofx files and test infra appreciated.