So now I'm wondering, since I've got a handful of purely custom importers and a whole bunch of new importers to write next quarter, what does the preponderance of the community use and why? I've heard of Red's importers, beancount-import, and now beangulp. I know there's others. I haven't looked at any of them personally yet because I'll need to package them for my niche linux distro first (NixOS has *some downsides*).
Just looking at the github repos: 1. beangulp was written by the same guy that wrote beancount itself (Hi Martin!) so I would expect it to integrate very well. 2. beancount-import has a web UI, which seems like a very useful tool for verifying all this automation (especially for expense categorization, which I'm skeptical can *ever* be particularly reliable) 3. red's importers has the most active community by far, and seems to focus heavily on a "run the script every time you look at the reports" workflow I don't have unit tests on my importers, and I'm importing from CSV's because I just got the simplest thing working. It's a KISS <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle> setup that's exactly as messy as it sounds. So given that I need to do an overhaul anyways, I'm curious why, for example, James doesn't use red's scripts. Is it just that a fully automated setup is harder to build? The peace of mind from looking at the web UI to verify stuff? Sincerely, Timothy Jesionowski On Mon, May 20, 2024 at 11:48 AM James Cook <falsif...@falsifian.org> wrote: > On Mon, May 20, 2024 at 03:33:15AM GMT, Felipe Flores wrote: > >Hey all, came here to express some gratitude for all the work you guys are > >doing. I've been using beancount with fava to manage all my finances down > >to the dollar for the last year or so, and I absolutely love it. > > > >Just wanted to add that I just migrated a bunch of importers to beangulp, > >and it was way easier than I expected. Wonderful job there. The whole > >reason I tried it out is that I spent a couple hours pulling my hair > trying > >to connect a debugger to my regression tests to no avail. With beangulp, > >however, I just had to tell the debugger config to launch the file with > >args (one of identify, generate, test, etc) and it worked just like that! > >I'd even suggest you guys advertise this as a feature! > > > >If anyone stumbles upon this thread wondering whether they should move > over > >to beangulp: do it. It's an easy migration, and they've even added an > >ImporterProtocol class that will make the transition even smoother. > > > >Thanks again! > > In case people haven't heard of it, I've been quite happy with > beancount-import: > > https://github.com/jbms/beancount-import > > I have not tried beangulp, so I don't know how they compare. But I > will mention beancount-import: > > - Has a web interface letting me quickly categorize transactions > (i.e. choose which account my money went to). > > - Chooses the right account automatically most the time (maybe 95%), > so mostly in this web interface I'm just pressing enter to confirm > each transaction. To do this, it trains a model based on transactions > already in my beancount ledger. > > - Adds metadata to imported transactions to keep track of where they > came from (e.g. a transaction ID from an ofx file). This lets me > (a) not worry about whether or not I've imported something (e.g. when > I export from my bank, I just replace my existing ofx download with > a new one covering a longer time range) and (b) see a list of > postings I've entered manually that don't correspond to anything > imported (a sign something went wrong). This is my favourite > feature and I wonder if beangulp has something similar. > > - Also, I have been able to write my own custom importer including > unit tests without much difficulty. > > -- > James > > -- > 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 beancount+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/3ku5paorsc7iygd3zg7i433b7j46ecycgwgd3hvun757niycfy%40pnnt32hdaald > . > -- 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 beancount+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/CAOVsoWRoARN%3DPm7ZcpANOfhmTkDtRWeDhL2qaA7DK4z-1AVopQ%40mail.gmail.com.
