> > > - *I update my journal every month. Getting updated transactions from > 25+ different accounts every month is very time consuming.* > - *Todo: Research programmatic downloads of transactions from all > banks (has this been done already?)* > > This was the biggest frustration for me. I spent a lot of time getting to a "one-button update". Today, I'm 90% there. I have ~45 accounts. - 14 of these don't have a scriptable ofx API (aka ofx/qfx via quicken directconnect). For these, I have to login to the website and download the ofx - with the remaining, I use ofxget <https://ofxtools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/client.html> and some homecooked scripts to automatically get them. My login info is stored in pass <https://www.passwordstore.org/>, which truly makes this a matter of typing a single command to download dozens of ofx - I spent tons of time writing importers <https://github.com/redstreet/beancount_reds_importers> with reusable code to process these - Investment accounts are predictable to build transactions for. For credit card accounts, I use the awesome smart_importer <https://github.com/beancount/smart_importer>
My total time to update is now less than 5 minutes. This doesn't include three or four accounts which I have to submit GDPR requests to get data for, and such, but I don't care about updating these more frequently than 3-4 times a year. Bringing my total data update time to under 5mins was critical to me in making personal finance productive and fun, by being able to focus on the actual financial parts. (TODO to myself: write a blog/article about my setup) > > - *The beancount file is getting overwhelmingly large after just 1 > year. This is making it hard for me to jump around and find/fix things. > I > often have personal transactions that cross equity accounts into our > rental > business, or my software engineering self employment.* > - *Todo: split personal.beancount into smaller journals (by month?)* > > As others said, why bother when it can be automated? I used to have a file tree that mirrored my account hierarchy. I still have different source files for different real-world accounts, which makes it easy to debug, and keeps the file sizes somewhat small. I patch beancount's extract.py to directly append to these files. Happy to share the patch. > - *omni-complete in vim is an awkward keyboard chord and account > completions in vim are sometimes broken depending on what you last typed* > - *Todo: try VSCode which can now embed neovim and has it's own > beancount extension that should make the editing experience nicer* > - *except VSCode folding is weird so this might actually make > things worse* > > I use something similar to supertab <https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1643>, which works 100% of the time by just pressing Tab on an account. > - *I still don’t understand how reporting works, and part of that is > because I don't use it enough. I feel like I'm relearning Beancount Query > Language every time I do need something.* > - *Todo: keep a list of commonly-used queries* > > fava: 2017-01-01 query "Expense breakdown" "SELECT * FROM ...." > > - *reconciling receipts / splitting transactions is time consuming, > although vim macros help here* > - *Todo: Improve importer recognition of payees and likely expense > accounts* > > smart_importer <https://github.com/beancount/smart_importer> gets it right for me 90% of the time > > - *no way to attach receipt pictures to transactions?* > - *Todo: Research beancount tooling or other apps to capture receip* > > What I do: 1) drop all my receipt photos into a single directory (sync's from my phone automatically) 2) I use tesseract <https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract> + simple scripts to OCR the receipts and find a date for them 3) Use beancount and fava's document feature to make them appear next to Expense transactions. A bit more work could associate these with specific transactions via links or some such, but I personally don't have the need to do so. (TODO to myself: write a blog/article about my setup) > > - *fava is nice, but could be nicer* > - *Todo: Research writing a new frontend reporting/visualization > tool and/or contribute to fava* > > Any specifics on what would make it nicer? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Beancount" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/fe4d3301-7ee4-4b01-a0c3-ec8bef2266a2n%40googlegroups.com.
