As you imagine, the fact that it's text-only has been both a burden and a blessing.
Burdens:
- inserting transactions takes a long time, when you're starting out. will always take a long time if you never "automate"
- it's easy to make little mistakes and not catch it until the next time you compile or make a report.
blessings:
- git, sed, grep, awk all "work as advertised"
- you can automate the boring things, as they get more boring, and you can learn a lot along the way
at this stage, I have a combination of awk and python scripts (maybe 500 lines total, but a lot of it is regex) that convert my financial institutions' transaction export csvs into ledger transactions. I pretty much copy paste that into specific ledger files. The next step that I'm currently automating takes a concatenated `git diff` and interactively categorizes expenses/splits/assigns to the correct ledger file.
I also blew a ton of time (maybe 40 hours) on scraping those csvs from bank websites, workday, and fidelity (basically, a puppeteer script for logging in, downloading all the files available). Getting past google auth for workday was hard. But learning these things has been fun.
With all this automation, I spend maybe 20 minutes every weekend importing things over from the banks. I'd do it every month, but I'm still a control freak with it.
Doing this has been super fun! And it also has yielded a lot of insight into my finances. Above all, it gives me a feeling of "control" over my finances like no other. Itemizing deductions takes an hour, just as a throwaway example.
As you imagine, the fact that it's text-only has been both a burden and a blessing.
Burdens:
- inserting transactions takes a long time, when you're starting out. will always take a long time if you never "automate"
- it's easy to make little mistakes and not catch it until the next time you compile or make a report.
blessings:
- git, sed, grep, awk all "work as advertised"
- you can automate the boring things, as they get more boring, and you can learn a lot along the way
at this stage, I have a combination of awk and python scripts (maybe 500 lines total, but a lot of it is regex) that convert my financial institutions' transaction export csvs into ledger transactions. I pretty much copy paste that into specific ledger files. The next step that I'm currently automating takes a concatenated `git diff` and interactively categorizes expenses/splits/assigns to the correct ledger file.
I also blew a ton of time (maybe 40 hours) on scraping those csvs from bank websites, workday, and fidelity (basically, a puppeteer script for logging in, downloading all the files available). Getting past google auth for workday was hard. But learning these things has been fun.
With all this automation, I spend maybe 20 minutes every weekend importing things over from the banks. I'd do it every month, but I'm still a control freak with it.
Doing this has been super fun! And it also has yielded a lot of insight into my finances. Above all, it gives me a feeling of "control" over my finances like no other. Itemizing deductions takes an hour, just as a throwaway example.