ledger-autosync 0.2.1

Automatically sync your bank's data with ledger

ledger-autosync is a program to pull down transactions from your bank and create ledger transactions for them. It is designed to only create transactions that are not already present in your ledger files. This should make it comparable to some of the automated synchronization features available in products like GnuCash, Mint, etc.

Features

• supports ledger 3 and hledger

• like ledger, ledger-autosync will never modify your files directly

• interactive banking setup via ofxclient

• multiple banks and accounts

• import of downloaded OFX files, for banks not supporting automatic download

Platforms

ledger-autosync is developed on Linux with ledger 3; it has been tested on Windows (although it will run slower) and should run on OS X. It requires ledger 3 or hledger, but it should run faster with ledger, because it will not need to start a command to check every transaction.

Quickstart

Install from pip:

$ pip install ledger-autosync

Or install from source:

$ python setup.py install

Run ofxclient to set up banking:

$ ofxclient

When you have added your institution, quit ofxclient.

(At least one user has reported being signed up for a pay service by setting up OFX direct connect. Although this seems unusual, please be aware of this.)

Edit the generated ~/ofxclient.ini file. Change the description field of your accounts to the name used in ledger. Optionally, move the ~/ofxclient.ini file to your ~/.config directory.

Run:

ledger-autosync

This will download a maximum of 90 days previous activity from your accounts. The output will be in ledger format and printed to stdout. Add this output to your ledger file. When that is done, you can call:

ledger-autosync

again, and it should print nothing to stdout, because you already have those transactions in your ledger.

resync

By default, ledger-autosync will process transactions backwards, and stop when it sees a transaction that is already in ledger. To force it to process all transactions up to the --max days back in time (default: 90), use the --resync option. This can be useful when increasing the --max option. For instance, if you previously synchronized 90 days and now want to get 180 days of transactions, ledger-autosync would stop before going back to 180 days without the --resync option.

Syncing a file

Some banks allow users to download OFX files, but do not support fetching via the OFX protocol. If you have an OFX file, you can convert to ledger:

ledger-autosync /path/to/file.ofx

This will print unknown transactions in the file to stdout in the same way as ordinary sync. If the transaction is already in your ledger, it will be ignored.

How it works

ledger-autosync stores a unique identifier, provided by your institution for each transaction, as metadata in each transaction. When syncing with your bank, it will check if the transaction exists by running the ledger or hledger command. If the transaction exists, it does nothing. If it does not exist, the transaction is printed to stdout.

Assertions

If you supply the --assertions flag, ledger-autosync will also print out valid ledger assertions based on your bank balances at the time of the sync. These otherwise empty transactions tell ledger that your balance should be something at a given time, and if not, ledger will fail with an error.