I've been using ledger to manage my accounts for a couple of years, but I've never been 100% happy with the importing process. The process usually goes like this:
- Login to my bank and export transactions to a CSV file.
- Modify it so that ledger can read it.
- Run the
convert
command to change it to ledger syntax. - Go through the converted file and add categories as needed.
It's not too painful, but there's enough friction to put me off from doing it regularly. As part of my improve my processes goal I wanted to revisit this process and smooth off some rough edges.
There are a number of CSV conversion tools for ledger, and after some
experimentation I settled on reckon
.
With reckon
the import process looks like this:
- Login to my bank and export transactions to a CSV file.
- Run the
reckon
command and categorize transactions one-by-one.
It's a much more streamlined process, and categorizing transactions on the
command line is nice and easy. One feature I really like about reckon
is that
it can learn account names from existing files. This makes the data-entry part
much quicker, and for some accounts it can be run unattended without making
mistakes.
reckon
can also use a custom token file when categorizing transactions, so
with a little work I could eliminate the manual entry part entirely.
1 Comment
Thank you soooooo much for this recommendation. What a time saver this will be when I do my month end ;)