finance-dl 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...

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.

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.