finance-dl VS beancolage

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...

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.

Just FYI if you're used to beancount & fava I started prototyping a more integrated experience for it: https://github.com/seltzered/beancolage . Still early days though.

> Maybe this was primarily done based on the users being comfortable with a GUI driven system?

FWIW I started prototyping a plaintext accounting 'app' that combines a popular plaintext accounting system (beancount) with the most used web frontend for it (fava) - it's called beancolage and makes use of eclipse theia (vscode-like experience): https://github.com/seltzered/beancolage