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by gkbrk 2608 days ago
I've done something similar recently; but instead of grabbing data from my bank, I chose to enter data manually from receipts.

This makes it work for both cash and debit payments, and doesn't need any maintenance for API breakage. I find doing this data entry calming, to be honest.

I wrote about it here https://gkbrk.com/2019/04/plaintext-budgeting/

3 comments

I used to do this when I lived on a much tighter budget and found the data entry was calming and provided something to do that didn’t cost money. However, now that I have a little disposable income and a family the thought of sitting down and entering financial transactions every couple of days sounds horrifying. I can barely keep up with my monthly spreadsheet tracking net worth.
> Or… I could use a shell script to run calculations with SQLite.

I did exactly that and I import the data from the bank’s csv-export once per month. I have a set of sql statements to run and categorize everything and then I manually enter the stuff that isn’t caught by the script. I manually enter cash transactions.

And the end of the year I run a sql statement to generate a report with all of the significant amounts for taxes.

Did you consider to use some kind of OCR?