beancount-import VS Fava

Fighting with Mint and categorizing Amazon purchases was what initially pushed me down the path into plain text accounting (PTA).

I ended up long down the rabbit hole with auto-downloading Amazon orders (originally with https://github.com/jbms/finance-dl, but then my own custom scraping) and importing and matching them up with credit card transactions using beancount-import (https://github.com/jbms/beancount-import).

This ultimately resulted in me spending a lot less on Amazon - to the point that now doing it manually wouldn't be too bad...

I personally started with beancount-import to process QFX/OFX files from my bank. It's a nice product, because it automatically joins both sides of a transaction for transfers/payments from one bank to another, and has some auto-categorization features. But it does take some work to understand and get running.

Some skimming of the OFX import code indicates that the importer manages the duplicate detection itself. Since it looks like you need to pretty much write a CSV importer yourself, you'd probably have to manage the uniqueness using some identifier from the CSV file.

These HTML are stored in a common folder, then parsed by beancount-import using the built-in importer for Amazon Invoice HTML files from that project. The author of that project wrote/uses finance-dl to get his Amazon invoices. At one point, his download code wasn't working for me, so I wrote my own. Independently, for reasons I no longer remember.

Now, I'm trying to set up the bean-import (https://github.com/jbms/beancount-import) module but i have run in to some problems.

I handle them with Beancount and beancount-import. beancount-import identifies duplicate transactions and merges them automatically. It handles both the case where two import sources have the same transaction (e.g. your bank account/credit card situation) and the case where there's an existing manually-entered transaction that also exists in an import source.

What I use a lot is https://github.com/jbms/beancount-import. Since I know a bit of python I was able tweak the importer for my bank statements. It helps a lot.

I use beancount-import which does a great job of allowing for multiple sources of data (including manual entries) and matching up postings from multiple sources. It helps a lot for my particular use.

It's the wrong underlying toolset (beancount instead of ledger), but otherwise you're describing how beancount-import works.

I’ve been using beancount for almost 1.5 years now, and other than having to explicitly open accounts I love it! I use the fava UI to have all the nice modern visuals: https://beancount.github.io/fava/

I used Beancount + Fava for a web UI for years. It stores everything in plaintext files, but the downside is you either have to manually enter everything or probably write a script to import csv/qfx from your bank(s).

I suggest you take a look at fava. I don't think its data entry is good for you but the data visualization is pretty great.

And the following are interfaces of Beancount: Fava, a well-known UI

If you’re tech savvy, you could try beancount + fava web interface. https://beancount.github.io/fava/

I use Beancount myself (heavily supported by custom scripts). Plain text accounting options are not very user-friendly out of the box in my opinion. Beancount has a self-hosted web app called Fava that's good if you want a GUI. I believe there is something similar for ledger.