Re:Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash
by mattbillenstein on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @06:56PM
(#23241288)
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.
- 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