ledger-autosync is a program to pull down transactions from your bank and create ledger transactions for them. It is designed to only create transactions that are not already present in your ledger files (that is, it will deduplicate transactions). This should make it comparable to some of the automated synchronization features available in products like GnuCash, Mint, etc. In fact, ledger-autosync performs OFX import and synchronization better than all the alternatives I have seen.
Versions of ledger-autosync before 1.0.0 printed the ofxid in a slightly incorrect position. This should not effect usage of the program, but if you would like to correct the error, see below for more details.
- supports ledger 3 and hledger
- like ledger, ledger-autosync will never modify your files directly
- interactive banking setup via ofxclient
- multiple banks and accounts
- support for non-US currencies
- support for 401k and investment accounts
- tracks investments by share, not dollar value
- support for complex transaction types, including transfers, buys, sells, etc.
- import of downloaded OFX files, for banks not supporting automatic download
- import of downloaded CSV files from Paypal, Simple, Amazon and Mint
- any CSV file can be supported via plugins
ledger-autosync is developed on Linux with ledger 3 and python 3; it has been tested on Windows (although it will run slower) and should run on OS X. It requires ledger 3 or hledger, but it should run faster with ledger, because it will not need to start a command to check every transaction.
If you are on Debian or Ubuntu, an (older) version of ledger-autosync should be available for installation. Try:
$ sudo apt-get install ledger-autosync
If you use pip, you can install the latest released version:
$ pip install ledger-autosync
You can also install from source, if you have downloaded the source:
$ python setup.py install
You may need to install the following libraries (on debian/ubuntu):
$ sudo apt-get install libffi-dev libpython-dev libssl-dev libxml2-dev python-pip libxslt-dev
Once you have ledger-autosync installed, you can download an OFX file from your bank and run ledger-autosync against it:
$ ledger-autosync download.ofx
This should print a number of transactions to stdout. If you add these
transactions to your default ledger file (whatever is read when you
run ledger without arguments), you should find that if you run
ledger-autosync again, it should print no transactions. This is
because of the deduplicating feature: only new transactions will be
printed for insertion into your ledger files.
ledger-autosync also supports using the OFX protocol to automatically connect to banks and download data. You can use the ofxclient program (which should have been installed with ledger-autosync) to set up banking:
$ ofxclient
When you have added your institution, quit ofxclient.
(At least one user has reported being signed up for a pay service by setting up OFX direct connect. Although this seems unusual, please be aware of this.)
Edit the generated ~/ofxclient.ini file. Change the
description field of your accounts to the name used in ledger.
Optionally, move the ~/ofxclient.ini file to your ~/.config
directory.
Run:
ledger-autosync
This will download a maximum of 90 days previous activity from your accounts. The output will be in ledger format and printed to stdout. Add this output to your ledger file. When that is done, you can call:
ledger-autosync
again, and it should print nothing to stdout, because you already have those transactions in your ledger.
ledger-autosync stores a unique identifier as metadata with each transaction. (For OFX files, this is a unique ID provided by your institution for each transaction.) When syncing with your bank, it will check if the transaction exists by running the ledger or hledger command. If the transaction exists, it does nothing. If it does not exist, the transaction is printed to stdout.
When generating transactions, ledger-autosync attempts to match
previous payees to determine the appropriate accounts. For instance,
if a previous payee was Grocery store, and one posting was to the
account Expenses:Food, ledger-autosync will use that account again.
If ledger-autosync can’t find a matching payee, it will use
Expenses:Misc or the value of the --unknown-account argument.
The matching is not very sophisticated: it only does exact matching on the payee, and it uses transaction with the matching payee. It is also not currently working with CSV files.
If you prefer to modify the payees to make them shorter than what is
generated by ledger-autosync, you can use the AutosyncPayee metadata
field to indicate to ledger-autosync that it should use the longer
form for matching. For instance:
2011/03/31 Grocery ; AutosyncPayee: Payment to Grocery store #12345 CALIFORNIA Assets:Bank -$0.01 Expenses:Food $0.01
would indicate to ledger-autosync that any payee with the name
Payment to Grocery store #12345 CALIFORNIA should use the
Expenses:Food account.
ledger-autosync stores a metatag with every posting that it outputs to
support deduplication. This metadata tag is either ofxid (for OFX
imports) or csvid for CSV imports.
Pre-1.0.0 versions of ledger-autosync put this metadata tag in a
slightly incorrect place, associating the metadata tag with the
transaction itself, and not simply one posting. This should not effect
the usage of ledger-autosync, but if you would like to correct your
ledger files, there is a small python script fix_ofxid.py included
with ledger-autosync. It can be run as:
python fix_ofxid.py <input file>
and will print a corrected file to stdout.
If you have a CSV file, you may also be able to import it using a recent (installed via source) version of ledger-autosync. ledger-autosync can currently process CSV files as provided by Paypal, Amazon, or Mint. You can process the CSV file as follows:
ledger-autosync /path/to/file.csv -a Assets:Paypal
With Amazon and Paypal CSV files, each row includes a unique identifier, so ledger-autosync will be able to deduplicate against any previously imported entries in your ledger files.
With Mint, a unique identifier based on the data in the row is generated and stored. If future downloads contain identical rows, they will be deduplicated. This method is probably not as robust as a method based on unique ids, but Mint does not provide a unique id, and it should be better than nothing. It is likely to generate false negatives: transactions that seem new, but are in fact old. It will not generate false positives: transactions that are not generated because they seem old.
If you are a developer, you should fine it easy enough to add a new
CSV format to ledger-autosync. See, for example, the MintConverter
class in the ledgerautosync/converter.py file in this repository.
See below for how to add these as plugins.
If you supply the --assertions flag, ledger-autosync will also
print out valid ledger assertions based on your bank balances at the
time of the sync. These otherwise empty transactions tell ledger that
your balance should be something at a given time, and if not, ledger
will fail with an error.
If you have a 401k account, ledger-autosync can help you to track the state of it. You will need OFX files (or an OFX protocol connection as set up by ofxclient) provided by your 401k.
In general, your 401k account will consist of buy transactions,
transfers and reinvestments. The type will be printed in the payee
line after a colon (:)
The buy transactions are your contributions to the 401k. These will be printed as follows:
2016/01/29 401k: buymf Assets:Retirement:401k 1.12345 FOOBAR @ $123.123456 ; ofxid: 1234 Income:Salary -$138.32
This means that you bought (contributed) $138.32 worth of FOOBAR (your
investment fund) at the price of $123.123456. The money to buy the
investment came from your income. In ledger-autosync, the
Assets:Retirement:401k account is the one specified using the
--account command line, or configured in your ofxclient.ini.
The Income:Salary is specified by the --unknown-account
option.
If the transaction is a “transfer” transaction, this usually means either a fee or a change in your investment option:
2014/06/30 401k: transfer: out Assets:Retirement:401k -1.61374 FOOBAR @ $123.123456 ; ofxid: 1234 Transfer $198.69
You will need to examine your statements to determine if this was a fee or a real transfer back into your 401k.
Another type of transaction is a “reinvest” transaction:
2014/06/30 401k: reinvest Assets:Retirement:401k 0.060702 FOOBAR @ $123.123456 ; ofxid: 1234 Income:Interest -$7.47
This probably indicates a reinvestment of dividends. ledger-autosync
will print Income:Interest as the other account.
By default, ledger-autosync will process transactions backwards, and
stop when it sees a transaction that is already in ledger. To force it
to process all transactions up to the --max days back in time
(default: 90), use the --resync option. This can be useful when
increasing the --max option. For instance, if you previously
synchronized 90 days and now want to get 180 days of transactions,
ledger-autosync would stop before going back to 180 days without the
--resync option.
By default, ledger-autosync attempts to generate a decent payee line
(the information that follows the date in a ledger transaction).
Unfortunately, because of differences in preference and in the format
of OFX files, it is not always possible to generate the user’s
preferred payee format. ledger-autosync supports a payee-format
option that can be used to generate your preferred payee line. This
option is of the format Text {memo}, where memo is a
substitution based on the value of the transaction. Available
substitutions are memo, payee, txntype, account and
tferaction. For example:
$ ledger-autosync --payee-format "Memo: {memo}"
2011/03/31 Memo: DIVIDEND EARNED FOR PERIOD OF 03/01/2011 THROUGH 03/31/2011 ANNUAL PERCENTAGE YIELD EARNED IS 0.05%
This option is also available for CSV conversion. For CSV files, you can substitution any of the values of the rows in the CSV file by name. For instance, for Paypal files:
$ ledger-autosync --payee-format "{Name} ({To Email Address})" -a Paypal paypal.csv
2016/06/04 Jane Doe (someone@example.net)
If the ledger python bindings are available, ledger-autosync can use
them if you pass in the --python argument. Note, however, they can
be buggy, which is why they are disabled by default
ledger-autosync has support for plugins. By placing python files a
directory named ~/.config/ledger-autosync/plugins/ it should be
possible to automatically load python files from there. You may place
CsvCconverter subclasses here, which will be selected based on the
columns in the CSV file being parsed and the FIELDSET of the CSV
converters. You may also place a single OfxConverter in the plugin
directory, which will be used in place of the stock OfxConverter.
Below is an example CSV converter, starting with the input CSV file:
"Date","Name","Amount","Balance" "11/30/2016","Dividend","$1.06","$1,000“
The following converter in the file ~/.config/ledger-autosync/plugins/my.py:
from ledgerautosync.converter import CsvConverter, Posting, Transaction, Amount
import datetime
import re
class SomeConverter(CsvConverter):
FIELDSET = set(["Date", "Name", "Amount", "Balance"])
def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
super(SomeConverter, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
def convert(self, row):
md = re.match(r"^(\(?)\$([0-9,\.]+)", row['Amount'])
amount = md.group(2).replace(",", "")
if md.group(1) == "(":
reverse = True
else:
reverse = False
if reverse:
account = 'expenses'
else:
account = 'income'
return Transaction(
date=datetime.datetime.strptime(row['Date'], "%m/%d/%Y"),
payee=row['Name'],
postings=[Posting(self.name, Amount(amount, '$', reverse=reverse)),
Posting(account, Amount(amount, '$', reverse=not(reverse)))])
Running ledger-autosync file.csv -a assets:bank will generate:
2016/11/30 Dividend
assets:bank $1.06
income -$1.06
To ignore a row you can return None from your convert method.
ledger-autosync will produce no output for that row.
For more examples, see https://gitlab.com/egh/ledger-autosync/blob/master/ledgerautosync/converter.py#L421 or the example plugins directory.
If you develop a converter that you think will be generally useful, please consider submitting a pull request.
ledger-autosync uses pytest for tests. To test, run pytest in the project directory. This will test the ledger, hledger and ledger-python interfaces. If hledger or the ledger-python interface is not found, these tests will be skipped.