Hi Jonathan,
Q1
I would say whenever you have both (or more) sides of a transactions
then it's the best to import all legs. The thing is that in most cases
you don't have them. On thing that I also do quite often is, that if I
can import both sides of a transaction form two different sources (e.g.
two different banks), then I use the transaction ids of each bank to add
them to the same transaction, so I know that I have it imported from
both sides.
Q2
Not sure if you've come across smart importer
https://github.com/beancount/smart_importer, this is a wrapper around
your importer that uses existing transactions to guess what the missing
other leg could be. For me this works extremely well.
I use it together with the web ui fava https://github.com/beancount/fava
when you then run an importer you get basically the list of all your
transactions and you can still modify if the smart importer guess wrong.
What I also started doing more and more (and also works quite nicely),
is to actually not even have a file to import but instead directly use
an available api (e.g. truelayer, revolut, transferwise, interactive
brokers, ...), you can see some examples in my beancounttools
https://github.com/tarioch/beancounttools
Q3
There were some enhancements done for hooks:
https://github.com/beancount/beancount/issues/458
Regards,
Patrick
On 25.06.2020 07:15, Jonathan Goldman wrote:
Hi,
I have done a bunch of exploration of beancount over the last few
months and really like its capabilities and now ready to get serious
about getting it working for me. So far this is what I have done:
* Used the sample files to familiarize myself with the commands and
beancount's capabilities.
* Created accounts and manually entered some real data for my
personal finances.
* Tried this <https://github.com/jbms/beancount-import>
sem-auto-categorization web-based import tool. It's good but I
think I'll mostly go the manual route.
* Tried various import methods
o Tried importing a quicken file...have had some trouble with this.
o Tried a csv2ofx <https://github.com/reubano/csv2ofx> tool
o Used reds_importers
<https://github.com/redstreet/beancount_reds_importers/blob/master/README.md>
for Vanguard. This has worked successfully. This generates
output that has two-sided.
o Wrote my own csv importer for my bank that is based on this
csv
<https://gist.github.com/mterwill/7fdcc573dc1aa158648aacd4e33786e8#file-importers-chase-py>
importer.. (I'm not a software engineer by training so this
took me some time but I'm very happy with this now and
understand the code much more). This generates output that is
only one-sided.
My own conclusion is that I want go the route suggested by Martin and
effectively have my own importers for each source and with text-based
editor with auto-completion do the categorization. For the brokerages
there are a limited number of accounts/categories you can have so
doing the two-sided entry can be done here so it is
auto-categorization if you will. (e.g. dividends from account xyz
always go to this income account, etc). For credit cards and banks it
rarely helps as there are so many expense categories.**Perhaps a
subset (e.g. interest income from the bank can be autocategorized or
mortgage payment of specific amount) can be automated.
*
*
*Q1. Is doing two-side entry for brokerages and single-side for
banks/credit cards a good approach the general practice that most here
use? *
*Q2. Is there other import approaches to consider? I think I'm finding
this the hardest part to get going on and that is why other tools like
Quicken/Mint/GnuCash are easier to get going. So not sure how, but
perhaps data collection and import is something already solved that is
not beancount specific?*
*
*
I also noticed that Martin mentioned this in the import documentation
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/11EwQdujzEo2cxqaF5PgxCEZXWfKKQCYSMfdJowp_1S8/edit#>:
A list of things I’d really want to add, beyond fortifying what’s
already there:
*
A generic, configurable CSV importer which you can
instantiate. I plan to play with this a bit and build a
sniffer that could automatically figure out the role of each
column.
*
A hook to allow you to register a callback for post-processing
transactions that works across all importers.
*Q3. Is there any update/development on these two items?*
thanks,
Jonathan
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