Ledger with Autosync

A while back I started tracking my finances with legder-cli, a command-line tool for double-entry bookkeeping. It’s been a lot of fun, but one of the stumbling blocks is recording each transaction by hand. Fortunately almost every bank nowadays offers an API so you can download your recent account activity in a format like OFX (Open Financial Exchange) or QFX (Quicken’s extended OFX), and ledger has tools to import that data.

For this I use ledger-autosync, which is built on top of ofxclient. First you run ofxclient to create a ~/ofxclient.ini file with the details of all your accounts. Then you run ledger-autosync, which will first read your ledger file (whatever $LEDGER_FILE points to), then contact the banks and print out any new transactions. It tries to guess expense categories, but often you need to correct these. Still, that’s a lot easier than typing in everything!

Because of this step, I like to have ledger-autosync append to a review.ldg file, which I periodically edit to correct expense categories, then cut-and-paste into my regular $LEDGER_FILE. I also do some extra tweaking to format the entries how I like them. Here is the command I use:

ledger-autosync \
  -l ~/share/accounting/in-progress.ldg \
  -i 2 \
  | sed 's,^\([0-9]\{4\}\)/\([0-9]\{2\}\)/\([0-9]\{2\}\),\1-\2-\3,' \
  >> ~/share/accounting/review.ldg

That uses two spaces for indents (-i 2) and rewrites the dates.

Also note how I override $LEDGER_FILE with the -l option. That’s a trick to keep ledger-autosync from entering the same transactions twice into review.ldg. The contents of in-progress.ldg are just this:

# This file exists so that ledger-autosync will read review.ldg
# and not download entries it's already pulled down
# but we haven't yet reviewed.

include pj.ldg
include review.ldg

And that’s it! This setup makes it pretty painless keeping track of everything. I don’t have to do a lot of typing, and nothing slips through the cracks. I actually kind of like that categorizing forces me to look at expenses every week or so. If you are thinking about using ledger, hopefully this helps you out!