Awesome Beancount - Beancount tricks and tips

[Zhuoyun Wei]

Hi Beancount users,

we started a new project "Awesome Beancount"
(https://github.com/wzyboy/awesome-beancount), which tends to be a
collection of various Beancount tricks and tips, giving new users a
head start when learning command-line double-entry accounting and
using Beancount for the first time. For now, it's just a collection of
a few Beancount importers.

Why a new project when Martin has already written LedgerHub (now
merged back in Beancount)? It seems that LedgerHub / Beancount
supports only standardized bill formats like OFX. I am not sure, but
according to Wikipedia, OFX is rarely used outside the North America.
I live in China and I have never heard of any banks in China providing
OFX (or similar open standards) access. Every bank and financial
service has its own format of "bills", making users have to write
their own scripts to parse them. Within a shared user base, these
scripts could be re-used with minor modifications, saving new users a
lot of time if they want to start using Beancount.

Since all these private formats of bills are not standardized formats,
code to parse them are of course "dirty code" and highly
service-specific, making them not suitable to be merged in Beancount
project. Thus we started a separate project to host them.

If your banks do not support open formats like OFX, you are welcome to
contribute to this project, sharing your scripts with other Beancount
users!


--
Zhuoyun Wei

[Martin Blais]

On Sat, Mar 5, 2016 at 2:09 AM, Zhuoyun Wei <wzyb...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Beancount users,

we started a new project "Awesome Beancount"
(https://github.com/wzyboy/awesome-beancount), which tends to be a
collection of various Beancount tricks and tips, giving new users a
head start when learning command-line double-entry accounting and
using Beancount for the first time. For now, it's just a collection of
a few Beancount importers.

Good stuff. I've added a link from the contribs doc:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Z37bQ45wDtjTPaMQ_x-f33p1trH9fNosEAUgbQXwp30/edit

I've also added a link to your blog post in Chinese, which I just discovered:

https://wzyboy.im/post/1063.html

 

Why a new project when Martin has already written LedgerHub (now
merged back in Beancount)? It seems that LedgerHub / Beancount
supports only standardized bill formats like OFX.

More accurately, what's going on is that beancount.ingest (previously LedgerHub) supports any format, but it will only include a few generic importers as examples: I'll clean up and move in the OFX importer and a configurable CSV importer soon.

Otherwise I have my own private repo with a lot of importers for the banks I use. It's similar to your new project except that I have a lot of regression testing with real downloaded files in it.

I am not sure, but
according to Wikipedia, OFX is rarely used outside the North America.
I live in China and I have never heard of any banks in China providing
OFX (or similar open standards) access. Every bank and financial
service has its own format of "bills", making users have to write
their own scripts to parse them. Within a shared user base, these
scripts could be re-used with minor modifications, saving new users a
lot of time if they want to start using Beancount.

See this doc: http://furius.ca/ledgerhub/doc/postmortem

for some reasons why I think effectively doing this is a bit difficult.

Since all these private formats of bills are not standardized formats,
code to parse them are of course "dirty code" and highly
service-specific, making them not suitable to be merged in Beancount
project. Thus we started a separate project to host them.

If your banks do not support open formats like OFX, you are welcome to
contribute to this project, sharing your scripts with other Beancount
users!

SGTM

Thanks for sharing your code!