News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files by balves on Sunday January 30, 2022 @03:32PM (#30140809)
https://github.com/redstreet/beancount_reds_importers/tree/m...

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.

Re:Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files by haberman on Sunday January 30, 2022 @04:08PM (#30141112)
Do you find that all of your financial institutions offer reliable OFX/CSV feeds?

I'm asking because I've generally come to the conclusion that PDF is the only universal data format that every institution will offer.

Re:Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files by balves on Sunday January 30, 2022 @10:56PM (#30144286)
All of my high-volume (in terms of number of transactions) accounts are easily importable. There are a few that don't have great import functionality, but I only have 1-2 transactions on them a month so haven't felt the toil pain to better automate them. 1-2 hours a month of balancing is not worth optimizing down to 0.5-1 hour to me.
Re:Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files by tacostakohashi on Sunday January 30, 2022 @09:13PM (#30143707)
OFX is the closest to being universal, although often it is well hidden.

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.

Re:Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files by andreareina on Monday January 31, 2022 @06:48AM (#30146996)
There's also the heterogeneity of transactions. Looking at the csv export I've got from my bank, there are three "reference" columns and they play different roles depending on how I'm paying:

    - 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
And a data sanitation issue: one of the merchant names has a comma in it, and it's not escaped or quoted in the csv so that record is corrupted.
Re:Beancount: Double-entry accounting from text files by OJFord on Sunday January 30, 2022 @04:44PM (#30141440)
Not GP, but in my experience they offer CSV with the most helpful columns for programmatic use omitted; present only in the PDF.

Of course I've submitted requests pointing it out/requesting it, but to be honest I can only assume it's deliberate.