Beancount Importers

Let’s assume you have created an importer for “MyBank” called MyBankImporter:

class MyBankImporter(importer.Importer):
    """My existing importer"""
    # the actual importer logic would be here...

Note: This documentation assumes you already know how to create Beancount/Beangulp importers. Relevant documentation can be found in the beancount import documentation. With the functionality of beangulp, users can write their own importers and use them to convert downloaded bank statements into lists of Beancount entries. Examples are provided as part of beangulps source code under examples/importers.

smart_importer only works by appending onto incomplete single-legged postings (i.e. It will not work by modifying postings with accounts like “Expenses:TODO”). The extract method in the importer should follow the latest interface and include an existing_entries argument.

Using smart_importer as a beangulp hook

Beangulp has the notation of hooks, for some detailed example see beangulp hook example <https://github.com/beancount/beangulp/blob/ead8a2517d4f34c7ac7d48e4ef6d21a88be7363c/examples/import.py#L50>. This can be used to apply smart importer to all importers.

• PredictPostings - predict the list of postings.

• PredictPayees- predict the payee of the transaction.

For example, to convert an existing MyBankImporter into a smart importer:

from your_custom_importer import MyBankImporter
from smart_importer import PredictPayees, PredictPostings

CONFIG = [
    MyBankImporter('whatever', 'config', 'is', 'needed'),
]

HOOKS = [
    PredictPostings().hook,
    PredictPayees().hook
]

Wrapping an importer to become a smart_importer

Instead of using a beangulp hook, it’s possible to wrap any importer to become a smart importer, this will modify only this importer.

• PredictPostings - predict the list of postings.

• PredictPayees- predict the payee of the transaction.

For example, to convert an existing MyBankImporter into a smart importer:

from your_custom_importer import MyBankImporter
from smart_importer import PredictPayees, PredictPostings

CONFIG = [
    PredictPostings().wrap(
        PredictPayees().wrap(
            MyBankImporter('whatever', 'config', 'is', 'needed')
        )
    ),
]

HOOKS = [
]

Specifying Training Data

The smart_importer hooks need training data, i.e. an existing list of transactions in order to be effective. Training data can be specified by calling bean-extract with an argument that references existing Beancount transactions, e.g., import.py extract -e existing_transactions.beancount. When using the importer in Fava, the existing entries are used as training data automatically.

Usage with Fava

Smart importers play nice with Fava. This means you can use smart importers together with Fava in the exact same way as you would do with a conventional importer. See Fava’s help on importers for more information.

Executing the Unit Tests

Simply run (requires tox):

make test

Configuring Logging

Python’s logging module is used by the smart_importer module. The according log level can be changed as follows:

import logging
logging.getLogger('smart_importer').setLevel(logging.DEBUG)

Using Tokenizer

Custom tokenizers can let smart_importer support more languages, eg. Chinese.

If you looking for Chinese tokenizer, you can follow this example:

First make sure that jieba is installed in your python environment:

pip install jieba

In your importer code, you can then pass jieba to be used as tokenizer:

from smart_importer import PredictPostings
import jieba

jieba.initialize()
tokenizer = lambda s: list(jieba.cut(s))

predictor = PredictPostings(string_tokenizer=tokenizer)