You're parsing PDF? I'd imagine most places allow some sort of data export like csv or something? That's how I get the data out of Chase and BofA.

Yes, in my experience CSV/XML/etc export is spotty. Some institutions don't have it at all, and even when they do the time range can be limited or hard to time-window reliably.

For example, I can't get CSV about my pay stub and all the places money flows (taxes, insurance, etc). So I use PDF as the best way to get all the data.

Parsing PDF is a huge PITA, since PDF is really designed only for layout and not to encode semantic document structure. But if you want the greatest amount of visibility, nothing is as authoritative as the actual statements.

Yeah, I guess I don't really look at paystubs often and my banks support good csv export for like 2+ years, so I'll always have it when I need when I refresh those sheets. I do year-to-date in those sheets to make them not huge.

Regarding taxes, I do a tax year calculation using my W2's and returns to compute an effective tax rate and figure out ways I can improve my situation re taxes -- but my budgeting basically only starts once the net money hits a bank account which has worked pretty well.

There are a few problems with exporting data... here's what comes to my mind at the moment:

- It's an additional step and unnecessary when you're already downloading PDF statements, which you probably should be doing regardless

- Data is often unavailable for export after a few months or a year or two (depending on the bank), far earlier than PDFs

- If you have PDF scans (especially from earlier days) then you need to parse the OCR anyway

- If you're using official APIs (instead of writing a scraper or or downloading by hand) then you may need to pay extra

To each their own, csv for me has been the easiest thing moving forward every month or three.

I did do a historical net worth calculation and the only data I had going back far enough was PDFs, so through a mix of bash scripts and pdftotext, I was able to get a number for each month back about 10 years. But I ended up just putting that monthly balance for each account in a google sheet so I could sum and plot it there. Now I just stick the month-end balance for each account in a sheet to keep this updated.

> beancount wants everything to live in One Giant Journal file

Actually, beancount supports include directive. See includes section [1] of the language syntax document

[1]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wAMVrKIA2qtRGmoVDSUBJGmY...

Thanks for the reference. But a single transaction can span multiple financial institutions. Say you pay off a credit card. One half of the transaction comes from the credit card statement, the other half comes from your bank. The two halves sum to zero.

My understanding is that the whole transaction has to live in one file with Beancount. This doesn't seem amenable to having each bank statement generate a single Beancount output file.

But I could be wrong. I don't know how Beancount's importer works.

I use beancount, and a somewhat custom importer and categorizer. (happy to expand on those but this comment is about the multi-transaction).

I have the categorizer send such transactions to a temporary "limbo account". So I have two transactions:

  # This TX is imported from checking acct statement:
  2020-05-15 * "ACH Payment BankA credit card"
      Assets:BankA:Checking  -500
      Equity:Limbo:CreditCardPayments

  # This TX is imported from credit card statement:
  2020-05-16 * "Payment applied THANK YOU"
      Liabilities:BankB:CreditCard  500
      Equity:Limbo:CreditCardPayments

In both cases the second posting is added by the automatic categorizer based on the description.

After doing a bout of imports, I look at the Limbo account, which should always sum to zero. Sometimes the two TXs don't appear on the same day, so occasionally there's a temporary balance there but that's fine.

I use the same to match up my direct deposits (one end from paystubs import, other from checking account), wire transfers between banks/brokerage, etc. I tend to put them in different subaccounts of "Equity:Limbo" so that I can more easily spot any discrepancies.

Edit: Should've first read the previous reply that says the same thing!

If you really want to do that, there is a beancount plugin called ZeroSum that does it

https://github.com/redstreet/beancount_reds_plugins/tree/mas...

Conceptually this is one transaction; from a book keeping (and beancount) perspective it is, or can be, two.

Often (in the US) the dates are different- debit from the bank on day X, post to credit card on day X + 1 or X + 2. For my stuff I want the dates in beancount to reflect the dates on the respective statements, so that the balances, which are date-specific, match.

So I capture these as two transactions. I do it as- debit the bank, credit the "ether", then debit the "ether" credit the credit card.

Beancount just wants the postings within a literal transaction to sum to zero. If this conceptual transaction is split into two literal transactions, with some fictional bridge account in between, they can live in different beancount files.

Can I ask how you parse PDFs? I'm curious both in terms of reading the PDF data (Python library?) and parsing it (regex?)... and do you have to deal with OCR as well?

I use "pdftotext -layout" and then parse that. Here is some more info from people who have tried this approach:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Thanks!