ofxstatement 0.5.0

Rationale

Most internet banking systems are capable of exporting account transactions to some sort of computer readable formats, but few supports standard data formats, like OFX. On the other hand, personal accounting tools, such as GnuCash support standard formats only, and will probably never support proprietary statement formats of online banking systems.

To bridge the gap between them, ofxstatement tool was created.

Mode of Operation

The ofxstatement tool is intended to be used in the following workflow:

1. At the end of each month, use your online banking service to export statements from all of your bank accounts to files in formats, known to ofxstatement.

2. Run ofxstatement on each exported file to convert it to standard OFX format. Shell scripts or Makefile may help to automate this routine.

3. Import generated OFX files to GnuCash or other accounting system.

Installation and Usage

Before using ofxstatement, you have to install plugin for your bank (or write your own!). Plugins are installed as regular python eggs, with easy_install or pip, for example:

$ pip3 install ofxstatement-lithuanian

Note, that ofxstatement itself will be installed automatically this way. After installation, ofxstatement utility should be available. You can check it is working by running:

$ ofxstatement list-plugins

You should get a list of your installed plugins printed.

After installation, usage is simple:

$ ofxstatement convert -t <plugin> bank_statement.csv statement.ofx

Resulting statement.ofx is then ready to be imported to GnuCash or other financial program you use.

Known Plugins

There are several user-developed plugins available:

Advanced Configuration

While ofxstatement can be used without any configuration, some plugins may accept additional configuration parameters. These parameters can be specified in configuration file. Configuration file can be edited using edit-config command, that brings your favored editor with configuration file open:

$ ofxstatement edit-config

Configuration file format is a standard .ini format. Configuration is divided to sections, that corresponds to --type command line parameter. Each section must provide plugin option that points to one of the registered conversion plugins. Other parameters are plugin specific.

Sample configuration file:

[swedbank]
plugin = swedbank

[dabske:usd]
plugin = litas-esis
charset = cp1257
currency = USD
account = LT123456789012345678

Such configuration will let ofxstatement to know about two statement file format, handled by plugins swedbank and litas-esis. litas-esis plugin will load statements using cp1257 charset and set custom currency and custom account number. This way, GnuCash will automatically associate imported .ofx statement with particular GnuCash account.

To convert proprietary danske.csv to OFX danske.ofx, run:

$ ofxstatement -t danske:usd danske.csv danske.ofx

Note, that configuration parameters are plugin specific. See particular plugin documentation for more info.

Writing your own Plugin

If plugin for your bank is not yet developed (see Known plugins section above), you can easily write your own, provided some knowledge about python programming language. There is an ofxstatement-sample plugin project available, that provides sample boilerplate and describes plugin development process in detail.