fints2ledger

A tool for downloading transactions from FinTS banking APIs and sorting them into a ledger journal.

pyfints is used to download the transactions. A list of compatible banks can be found there. This tool was tested with ING and GLS Bank.

Contents

• Install
• Usage
• Developing
• Changelog

Install

pip install --upgrade fints2ledger

Create config file at ~/.config/fints2ledger/config.yml file with the following contents and replace values in the fints category: (This file will also be automatically created if missing)

fints:
  blz: "<your bank's BLZ>"
  account: "<your account number>"
  password: "<your banking password>"
  endpoint: <your bank fints endpoint> # e.g.: https://fints.ing.de/fints for ING
  selectedAccount: "<account number>" # defaults to the value from "account"
                                      # useful when you have multiple accounts for the same login

ledger:
  prompts:
    - credit_account
    - debit_account
  autocomplete:
    accounts:
      - credit_account
      - debit_account
  defaults:
    debit_account: assets:bank:checking
  md5:
    - date
    - payee
    - purpose
    - amount

Usage

Run

fints2ledger

This will download the transactions from the last year and tries to convert them to a ledger journal.

A list of available command line arguments:

usage: fints2ledger [-h] [--no-csv] [--no-ledger] [--csv-file CSVFILE]
                    [--ledger-file LEDGERFILE] [--files-path FILES_PATH]
                    [--date START] [--separator SEPARATOR]
                    [--csv_date_format CSV_DATE_FORMAT]

Converting transactions from fints apis to ledger.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --no-csv              exclude conversion from fints to csv (default: not
                        excluded)
  --no-ledger           exclude conversion from csv to ledger (default: not
                        excluded)
  --csv-file CSVFILE    file to store/load csv transactions to/from (default:
                        transactions.csv)
  --ledger-file LEDGERFILE
                        file to store ledger entries to (default:
                        ledger.journal)
  --files-path FILES_PATH
                        directory to store fints2ledger files (like
                        config.yml) (default: ~/.config/fints2ledger/)
  --date START          start date to pull the FinTS entries from (format:
                        2017/12/31 or 17/12/31, default: last year)
  --separator SEPARATOR
                        character used as separator in csv file (default: ;)
  --csv_date_format CSV_DATE_FORMAT
                        Date format used in the donwloaded csv (and
                        subsequently the ledger file). hledger supports 3 date
                        formats (https://hledger.org/1.9/journal.html#simple-
                        dates). Format needs to be compatible with pythons
                        strftime(), see https://docs.python.org/3/library/date
                        time.html#strftime-strptime-behavior
                        (fints.csv_date_format in config.yml) (default:
                        %Y/%m/%d)

Template File

A template file with the name template.txt will be automatically generated. It will be user to create the ledger entries. It looks something like

{date} {payee} {posting} {purpose}
    ; md5sum: {md5sum}
    {debit_account:<60}    {currency} {debit}
    {credit_account:<60}    {currency} {credit}

Each name inside curly brackets can specify a value that can come from either a named csv column, a default value (from the config.yml) or an input prompt (also from the config.yml).

If you use beancount instead of (h)ledger use this template instead:

{date} txn "{payee} {posting} {purpose}"
    ; md5sum: {md5sum}
    {debit_account:<60}   {debit} {currency}
    {credit_account:<60}   {credit} {currency}

Automatically matching transactions

In the ledger category you can use a regex match on any field of the transaction data to automatically fill other fields.

Example: I do not want to enter a credit_account and purpose for my monthly recurring payments for the rent of my apartment. Same for my music streaming transactions. I can change the config.yml like this:

ledger:
  ...
  fills:
    - match:
        payee: "The Landlord"
        purpose: "Rent for apartment B month.*"
      fill:
        credit_account: "expenses:monthly:rent"
        purpose: "monthly rent"
    - match:
        payee: "MUSIC COMPANY 123"
      fill:
        credit_account: "expenses:monthly:musiccompany"
        purpose: "Monthly fee for music streaming"

Converting from csv to ledger without requesting a FinTS API

With the argument --no-csv the program will not create a csv file with banking transactions itself (default is fints -> csv -> ledger). Instead, it will convert directly from a csv file to ledger. This is useful when all transactions have already been downloaded or when converting from another source than FinTS to ledger.

The csv file must provide a headline which names the columns. The column names are then used to fill the values in the template file. Example:

date;amount;currency;payee;posting;purpose
2017/04/26;167.31;EUR;Billy, Bill;bonus;for vacation
2017/04/27;-130;EUR;John, Smith;debit entry;monthly electricity payment

Developing

You can modify the code yourself and run it with:

git clone https://github.com/MoritzR/fints2ledger.git
cd fints2ledger
python fints2ledger/main.py

Don't forget that your python version should be 3.5 or higher.

You can run the tests with:

pip install green
green

Changelog

The changelog can be found in CHANGELOG.md