> My total time to update is now less than 5 minutes.

Wow!  That is truly inspiring.  I am looking forward to your forthcoming blog 
post(s) on all of this.  Do you have anything already published I could flip 
through?

> 14 of these don't have a scriptable ofx API (aka ofx/qfx via quicken 
> directconnect)

Are you using quicken to access the APIs that area available?


> I use something similar to supertab 
> <https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1643>, 

I tried getting supertab to work and did not succeed.  I’m currently trying to 
get something going with neovim embedded in VSCode; but the folding in VSCode 
leaves a lot to be desired.


> 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.

Very cool.  I would love to steal some or all of this.  I’ve thought about 
using Apple’s document scanning into Files which also does OCR — but no idea 
how accessible the OCR data is (like is it embedded in the file, or kept in 
some other untouchable index).


> Any specifics on what would make [fava] nicer?

A few things off the cuff:
* The visualizations seem constrained by the size of the screen
* I’m not a big fan of the styling overall
* Would like to see better print styles/formatting, e.g. to export an income 
statement pdf for my accountant
This is not a great list, but my kid is running circles around me right now.

-- 
Dustin Farris
(646) 671-2007



> On Feb 14, 2021, at 6:41 PM, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 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? 
> 
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