[GNC] Third party OFX/CVS providers

[David T.]

I can't imagine having so many transactions that the time it took to program the process would in the end save me time in doing the accounting. 

My method for processing pdf statements is to open the pdf statement in one window and enter my transactions in GnuCash in another-- the old fashioned way: by keying them in. This is remarkably quick in most cases, due to autofill-- and it gives me a sanity check on the data that's getting input (does that transaction look right?). It works pretty well for me. 

David T.



On August 7, 2022 2:28:50 PM GMT+03:00, Tom Browder <tom.browder at gmail.com> wrote:
>On Sat, Aug 6, 2022 at 21:25 Chris Good <goodchris96 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> From: Tom Browder <tom.browder at gmail.com>
>> Sent: Sunday, 7 August 2022 12:37 AM
>> To: Chris Good <goodchris96 at gmail.com>
>> Cc: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
>> Subject: Re: [GNC] Third party OFX/CVS providers
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Aug 6, 2022 at 08:51 Chris Good <goodchris96 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> ..,
>>
>> Can you copy the text out of the pdf statement?
>>
>>
>>
>> Getting "organized" text programmatically out of PDF is a giant pain. My current approach is almost completely programmatic. BTW, Raku is the "sister" language of Perl, and it is a "scripting" language.
>>
>>
>>
>> Raku can also use Perl modules so I can use Finance::Quote with it if need be. But, until I can get the bank data working, I won't be needing it.
>>
>>
>>
>> Thanks, Chris.
>>
>>
>>
>> -Tom
>>
>>
>>
>> Hi Tom,
>>
>>
>>
>> I was actually suggesting you just highlight the transactions in the pdf statement and copy/paste them into a
>>
>> spreadsheet or text file before using a scripting language to reformat them but if you can programmatically
>> extract the text that would be better long term.
>
>But I did see Peter West's warning about checking results
>carefully--it's not always the expected result. Although I hope the
>products from the same source are consistent enough to make it
>reasonably fool proof. (See my comments below.)
>
>> I notice with my PDF statement that (free) Adobe Acrobat DC no longer allows me to select text (as they want me to pay for a fancy tool - BOO) but if you send the pdf to Edge or Chrome you can select just the transaction text.
>
>Yes, I now see my "PDF COmplete" on Windows can do that--I never
>thought of doing that until now.
>
>> Thanks for the info re Raku.
>
>You're welcome! I'm always happy for programmers to learn about Raku
>
>> Finance::Quote is just for getting stock prices from websites (usually) so not useful for this task.
>
>Right, but good to know for later.
>
>> Are you sure you cannot export transactions from your bank? All mine do although sometimes it is hard to find.
>
>Yes, and I agree it's sometimes hard to find. Yesterday I did find one
>bank (the bank I'm leaving) does have two choices of download for the
>credit card: CSV and OFX. That is very helpful for working on a
>transformation algorithm. I did look at the PDF to text transformation
>on one of the new bank's statements (definitely nothing but PDFs) and
>it looks surprisingly usable, so that's exciting.
>
>I was too hasty in my outright condemnation of PDF to text because I
>had worked on a project with a PDF expert to generate PDF as a native
>file and saw how easy it is to get things out of place. I usually
>create beautiful, and accurate, PDFs by writing the PostScript code
>and relying on Ghostscript's ps2pdf converter. Thus going backwards in
>the workflow is a little different for my longtime mindset.
>
>Best regards,
>
>-Tom
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