finance-dl VS beancount

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.

Have you had a look into plain text accounting like e.g. https://beancount.github.io/ ?

Also written in Python, loads of tooling around it. Might be even good to “just” as the database.

[1] https://plaintextaccounting.org [2] https://ledger-cli.org [3] https://beancount.github.io

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).

beancount -> https://beancount.github.io/

The beancount documentation has some good background material, and the concepts apply to ledger as well.

I track my personal finances using beancount. I have a plugin that I wrote for myself, which in beancount is a python module that is installed in the same python environment as beancount is.