Adding more accounts

Associated directory: 04-adding-more-accounts

You probably have more than one account at the same financial institution where you have your current account. It could be the current account of your significant other or a savings account. Hopefully statement for this account would be in the same format, so it should be easy to grab those as well and convert them.

For example, let's say that you have additional account 12345678 which you will now import, so eventually you want your import directory to look like this:

import
└── lloyds
    ├── in
    │   ├── 12345678_20171225_0001.csv      - newly downloaded files
    │   ├── 12345678_20171225_0002.csv      / 
    │   ├── 99966633_20171223_1844.csv
    │   ├── 99966633_20171224_2041.csv
    │   ├── 99966633_20171224_2042.csv
    │   └── 99966633_20171224_2043.csv
    ├── csv
    │   ├── 12345678_20171225_0001.csv      - scrubbed and cleaned
    │   ├── 12345678_20171225_0002.csv      /
    │   ├── 99966633_20171223_1844.csv
    │   ├── 99966633_20171224_2041.csv
    │   ├── 99966633_20171224_2042.csv
    │   └── 99966633_20171224_2043.csv
    └── journal
        ├── 12345678_20171225_0001.journal  - journals that we expect to generate
        ├── 12345678_20171225_0002.journal  /
        ├── 99966633_20171223_1844.journal
        ├── 99966633_20171224_2041.journal
        ├── 99966633_20171224_2042.journal
        └── 99966633_20171224_2043.journal

You will need to modify the CSV conversion rules to make sure that account1 is properly set (or inferred from a column in the input file). Apart from that, the rest is easy -- you drop statements in ./in, !include generated journals as necessary, run ./export.sh and it should just work.

However, it would not be a stretch to assume that you have moved funds between these accounts, and each transfer would be present in two statements - once for source account and once for destination account. This would mean that account balances (and balance assertions) will not be right.

Let's make sure that transfers are not double-counted.

Current account statements that were dealt with in the previous chapter included a couple of transfers from current to the savings account. Now that savings account statements are brought into play, they will contain records of these transfers as well, and if we were to include them as-is, balances for both current and savings accounts would be wrong, like this:

; In current account statement
2017-12-02 Transfer to savings
   assets:Lloyds:current  $-500
   assets:Lloyds:savings

; In the savings account statement
2017-12-02 Transfer from current
   assets:Lloyds:savings  $500
   assets:Lloyds:current

The trick here is to make both transfers face imaginary transfers account, so current account statement will contain a transaction moving funds from assets:Lloyds:current to transfers, and line in savings account statement will generate a transaction moving funds from transfers to assets:Lloyds:savings.

From transfers perspective, money will move in and out, and account will be left flat:

; In current account statement
2017-12-02 Transfer to savings
   assets:Lloyds:current  $-500
   assets:Lloyds:transfers

; In the savings account statement
2017-12-02 Transfer from current
   assets:Lloyds:savings  $500
   assets:Lloyds:transfers

This requires small changes changes to the rules file and conversion scripts that could be seen in the directory 04-adding-more-accounts or in the diffs/03-to-04.diff.

Now when you run ./export.sh, you can use version control system to verify that end-of-year balances for the current account are unchanged, which will mean that we are not double-counting transfers (you did put all generated reports under version control, didn't you?).

Next steps

Now you can start getting your data in shape, for example you can start to classify expenses by tweaking your CSV import rules.