beangulp is a redesign of the old importers code in Beancount v2. The
main goal of the project has always been to define a API for importers
and to build a minimal framework around it that implements most of the
tedious parts.
The common importers API should have enabled importers to be easily
shared and used in import applications implementing additional features
on top or simply implementing a specific workflow.
Judging from the overwhelming lack of feedback we received, I thing that
the goal has not been met.
On the other hand, implementing an importer is so simple that I am not
surprised that there are multiple projects dealing with importing
transactions into a Beancount ledger.
Personally I use beangulp with some extra functionality bolted on top to
do automatic categorization and some cleanup of the imported
transactions. I use Emacs and some personal tools built on top of
beancount-mode for reviewing the imported transactions. I would never
use a browser based solution because it would always be too slow
compared to working directly in Emacs.
Cheers,
Dan
On 20/05/24 20:59, Timothy Jesionowski wrote:
So now I'm wondering, since I've got a handful of purely custom
importers and a whole bunch of new importers to write next quarter, what
does the preponderance of the community use and why? I've heard of Red's
importers, beancount-import, and now beangulp. I know there's others. I
haven't looked at any of them personally yet because I'll need to
package them for my niche linux distro first (NixOS has /some downsides/).
Just looking at the github repos:
1. beangulp was written by the same guy that wrote beancount itself (Hi
Martin!) so I would expect it to integrate very well.
2. beancount-import has a web UI, which seems like a very useful tool
for verifying all this automation (especially for expense
categorization, which I'm skeptical can /ever/ be particularly reliable)
3. red's importers has the most active community by far, and seems to
focus heavily on a "run the script every time you look at the
reports" workflow
I don't have unit tests on my importers, and I'm importing from CSV's
because I just got the simplest thing working. It's a KISS
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle> setup that's exactly as
messy as it sounds. So given that I need to do an overhaul anyways, I'm
curious why, for example, James doesn't use red's scripts.
Is it just that a fully automated setup is harder to build? The peace of
mind from looking at the web UI to verify stuff?
Sincerely,
Timothy Jesionowski
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