-- title: Semiautomating Accountancy for Fun and Profit
-- author: pesco
-- date: 2009-10-05 21:40
-- lang: en

<</img/2009/z23.jpg>>
Zuse Z23 @ Technikmuseum Berlin -- /definately a semiautomatic accountant!/

Is anybody out there using 'ledger'[http://wiki.github.com/jwiegley/ledger]
or one of its siblings[http://wiki.github.com/jwiegley/ledger/ports] for their
personal accounting? If not, take this as a recommendation. It's a command-line
tool to generate various financial reports from a plain text listing of account
transactions. If you happen to have access to your bank transactions in csv
format, the script I wrote yesterday may be useful to you. It reads
comma-separated values from stdin and writes 'ledger' entries to stdout.

If you're German, your likely way to get csv files from your bank is via HBCI.
The right tool for the job appears to be
'aqbanking'[http://www.aquamaniac.de/sites/aqbanking/]. Hooking it up to the
bank is a bit of fiddling, so I'll reproduce the quick how-to here. This is
assuming authentication via PIN/TAN:

    $ aqhbci-tool4 adduser -t pintan --context=1 --hbciversion=300 \
            -b BLZ -u NUTZERKENNUNG -c KUNDENKENNUNG \
            -s SERVERURL \
            -N "Real Name"
    $ aqhbci-tool4 getsysid -c KUNDENKENNUNG
    $ aqhbci-tool4 getaccounts -c KUNDENKENNUNG

To fetch transactions from all accounts and print them in csv format:

    $ aqbanking-cli request -c /tmp/foo.ctx --transactions
    $ aqbanking-cli listtrans -c /tmp/foo.ctx

The 'csv2ledger' script is tailored to the default output format of the above.
I also have made a small shell script to drive these two commands and pipe the
result through the converter. It accepts an optional date range to which to
restrict the output.

**Appendix:**
 -	'csv2ledger.hs'[/log/2009/oct/csv2ledger.hs] converts comma-separated values
	to 'ledger' entries. //
	There are a few configuration settings at the top of the script to tell it
	about account names and the input format.
 -	'buchungen.sh'[/log/2009/oct/buchungen.sh] fetches transactions with
	'aqbanking' and shows them via 'csv2ledger'. //
	 Usage:

	    buchungen.sh [startdate [enddate]]  # date format: YYYYMMDD