My Beancount books are 95% automatic after 3 years (2024)

Re:My Beancount books are 95% automatic after 3 years (2024) by Helmut10001 on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @12:36PM (#43269673)

If you are in Europe, there is a very nice OSS software called Hibiscus [1] with APIs-connectivity for most banks, and (local) web scrapers for those banks that have no APIs.

I am working on a plugin to pull categories and transactions from the Hibiscus DB (H2 or PG) to Beancount [2]. It is not there yet, but the process overall looks promising.

[1]: https://www.willuhn.de/

[2]: https://github.com/Sieboldianus/beancount-hibiscus-importer

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Re:My Beancount books are 95% automatic after 3 years (2024) by amaccuish on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @01:44PM (#43270542)

Another Hibiscus fan.

I'm pretty sure FinTS/HBCI is a mostly only used here in Germany sadly. Which is a shame because all this "OpenBanking" stuff requires registering/paying/certificates etc.

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Re:My Beancount books are 95% automatic after 3 years (2024) by woolion on Thursday March 06, 2025 @03:10AM (#43277708)

https://github.com/willuhn/hibiscus

>Developer Information (in german)

Which sends to a Javadoc which is actually a 404.

To be honest, I wouldn't work on/with a project that uses not-English as primary language (even if it was my own). Maybe a bit of cleanup and documentation would help make it more accessible.

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Re:My Beancount books are 95% automatic after 3 years (2024) by Helmut10001 on Thursday March 06, 2025 @03:56AM (#43277983)

I agree. However, in those niche areas where the software is the only choice available, I can make compromises. This software has been developed over 10+ years, and many conventions did not exist that long ago. It's still great that the software exists (because there is no alternative).

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Re:My Beancount books are 95% automatic after 3 years (2024) by woolion on Thursday March 06, 2025 @10:51AM (#43281585)

Sure, I did not want to be overly dismissive; I've worked in the space and most options suck and/or are fairly expensive for what they are, so any decent to good OSS option would be really appreciated. However, these points would make for a hard sell.

Actually, a client is migrating their system and needs to redo their bank synchronization. Shall I try with Google Translate, or is there someone who would also work on updating some of the resources to English?

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Re:My Beancount books are 95% automatic after 3 years (2024) by Helmut10001 on Thursday March 06, 2025 @11:37AM (#43282129)

Maybe the author doesn't speak English. Or maybe it is too much out of his comfort zone. It is free software and anyone can translate it (the tools available today are pretty good, too). Right now I don't have the time and it's not too relevant for me. I write my beancount plugin in English because it can reach a wider audience that way.

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