New, small utility: find out how recently each account was updated

[Red S]

It is helpful to know what accounts you haven’t updated in a while in your journal. bean-download is a downloader that ships with beancount-reds-importers. It now has a new feature: bean-download needs-update shows a list of accounts needing updates, and the date of the last update (which is defined as the date of the last balance assertion on the account).

Installation: pip3 install beancount-reds-importers.

You can filter accounts via its configuration. It handles commodity leaf accounts.

Full article is here.

Example output:

$ bean-download needs-update Last Updated Account -------------- --------------------------------------------------------- 2023-07-22 Assets:Banks:MainOne 2023-02-05 Assets:Gift-Cards-and-Credits:Amazon-com-Gift-Cards

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[Dmitry Korochkin]

Hi Red,

Thanks a lot for your inspiring work - especially for detailed articles!

I'm trying to run BQL query for your article:

SELECT account, max(date) FROM #balances WHERE account ~ "^Assets:.*Bank" GROUP BY account

But I get error:

Unknown token: LexToken(error,'#balances WHERE account ~ "^Assets:.*Bank" GROUP BY account',1,31)

I use beancount 2.3.5 for now and bean-query supplied with it.

Do you use another version of bean-query?

[Red S]

Glad to know they help :).

I'm just running HEAD from master in beanquery (which doesn't seem to have releases yet). #balances was added in this commit, I believe. Hope that helps!

[Red S]

bean-download needs-update now accepts per-account metadata so you can specify how frequently you desire each account to be updated. If the metadata needs_update_days exists for an account, that will be used instead of the global configuration above, so you can specify:

2024-01-01 open Assets:MyBank USD needs_update_days: 90 2025-01-01 open Assets:AnotherBankAccount USD needs_update_days: 15

More here.

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[Justus Pendleton]

This is a nice change that I almost suggested when I first started using needs-update. Some accounts (retirement) only update quarterly, some update monthly (rarely used transaction accounts), and some need updates every 2-3 days (cash) ... and yet others I really only need every 6-12 months (like that savings account in another country I never use).

Thanks for reading my mind!

[Red S]

Heheh, glad to hear, and yes, same here: there are several accounts which are importer-unfriendly, but only need to be updated once in several months. Thanks for the feedback!