There is also piecash, which gives a nice Pythonic interface to the SQL files generated by GnuCash: https://pypi.org/project/piecash/
> Note this feature is considered experimental. It works for most of the common use cases but some corner cases have been reported to result in data loss. [1]
What importers do you mean? Are these importers you've written yourself, or existing importers you were able to reuse? What format are these importers pulling from (PDF statements, CSV, OFX, etc)?
https://github.com/jbms/beancount-import
https://beancount.github.io/docs/importing_external_data.htm...
Support for OFX is generally great, CSV is also great. There are some proof of concept things floating around too for PDF.
I'm asking because I've generally come to the conclusion that PDF is the only universal data format that every institution will offer.
CSV feeds are often surprisingly useless for programmatic / feed use, they're often littered with stupid textual headers and footers and lack important columns - they're designed to be opened in excel and looked at by a human, not parsed and ingested.
- debit card: merchant name + date, card number, blank
- alternative card-based payment system: constant (account number?), merchant, constant
- alternative app-based payment system: constant, merchant, user custom reference
Of course I've submitted requests pointing it out/requesting it, but to be honest I can only assume it's deliberate.
I've never used any import tools though, I just enter the transactions manually maybe once or twice a week. It's been fine - especially using beancount-mode for emacs, although admittedly it's just my accounts, it might not scale so well for a family.
It's VERY hard to accidentally miss capital gains, or get cost basis wrong on something, or have something not balance. Much harder than even ledger-cli, let alone the other alternatives. It feels at times like working with a static type system versus a dynamic type system.
And the burden associated with this is not anything more than other tools. Importers have been great. I have 68 asset subaccounts between my spouse and I (if you do double-entry accounting you'll know this isn't actually that many), and I spend about 1-2 hours a month balancing the books, doing reporting, etc.
Finally, it's quite easy to get your transactions into a pandas datatable or similar, allowing you to utilize your programming/datascience skills to do things that just aren't available in other tools. Mint offers nothing here, spreadsheets can do some of it (but the downsides of accuracy), and gnucash requires learning some niche scheme stuff; it feels very "tacked on".