Hey guys,

today I finally sat down and tried out Skrooge. This is the first finance program I ever used so please bear with me

I decided to try Skrooge to get a better overview about my spendings, i.e. where my money flows to. Here are some questions I couldn't figure out so far:

a) How am I supposed to get the data into Skrooge? So far I did a CSV export from my banking account. Is there no way to automate this, i.e. some wizard where I could enter my pin and it would scrape the last informations from my online banking site?
b) Assuming CSV is what I have to live with, why is Skrooge only tracking the Payee and not the Receiver? I have a hard time in categorizing my imported data since I have no access to the receiver information. Considering that all expenses from my side have my name as a Payee, I cannot easily discern these operations but instead have to figure out what is what based on the comments... Something that does not work everytime...
c) Also assuming CSV is what I'll have to import regularly, is there a way to setup some rules of how to automatically categorize operations? I.e. "if payee == A && comment INCLUDES B then CATEGORY = C"?
f) something I have yet to try out, but while I'm at it: is skrooge able to detect duplicates? If I e.g. import the next csv file and that happens to overlap with the previously imported data, will skrooge handle that (and skip these duplicates)?
I guess b) and c) I could solve by writing a custom skript that changes the CSV of my bank into a format that skrooge can better handle, i.e. by putting the receiver into the comment - not optimal but would be a feasable workaround I think.

d) is there a way to restore skrooge to the last state when reopening it? especially when I create multiple reports using the "new tab" feature, I always loose that data when closing & reopening skrooge...
e) can I configure skrooge to remember my choice of shown/hidden columns in e.g. the operations view? My bank gives operations no ID or "number" hence that is always empty and I have to hide that column again and again which is anoying.

Thanks, I am confident that I will be able to use skrooge at least with some additional scripting on my side. Cheers, thanks for working on this!

Milian Wolff wrote:Hey guys,

today I finally sat down and tried out Skrooge. This is the first finance program I ever used so please bear with me

Hi Millian, and thanks for using Skrooge And by the way, thanks for kdevelop too, it is our IDE of choice for Skrooge !

Milian Wolff wrote:I decided to try Skrooge to get a better overview about my spendings, i.e. where my money flows to. Here are some questions I couldn't figure out so far:

a) How am I supposed to get the data into Skrooge? So far I did a CSV export from my banking account. Is there no way to automate this, i.e. some wizard where I could enter my pin and it would scrape the last informations from my online banking site?

The problem with automation is that there is no open protocol for getting bank information. So for now, it wil have to stay a manual operation with whatever format can be exported.

Milian Wolff wrote:b) Assuming CSV is what I have to live with, why is Skrooge only tracking the Payee and not the Receiver? I have a hard time in categorizing my imported data since I have no access to the receiver information. Considering that all expenses from my side have my name as a Payee, I cannot easily discern these operations but instead have to figure out what is what based on the comments... Something that does not work everytime...

The payee is a generic field for the person you paid to in case of payment, or the person who gave you money in case of income. But Skrooge can help you processing this information (keep reading)

Milian Wolff wrote:c) Also assuming CSV is what I'll have to import regularly, is there a way to setup some rules of how to automatically categorize operations? I.e. "if payee == A && comment INCLUDES B then CATEGORY = C"?

Yes you can Please have a look at "Search and Process" in the documentation

Milian Wolff wrote:f) something I have yet to try out, but while I'm at it: is skrooge able to detect duplicates? If I e.g. import the next csv file and that happens to overlap with the previously imported data, will skrooge handle that (and skip these duplicates)?

Hmm, unsure with this one... Usually you don't download the same information twice, and most banks I've had experienced with allow
you to download operations since your last download.

I guess b) and c) I could solve by writing a custom skript that changes the CSV of my bank into a format that skrooge can better handle, i.e. by putting the receiver into the comment - not optimal but would be a feasable workaround I think.

Milian Wolff wrote:d) is there a way to restore skrooge to the last state when reopening it? especially when I create multiple reports using the "new tab" feature, I always loose that data when closing & reopening skrooge...
e) can I configure skrooge to remember my choice of shown/hidden columns in e.g. the operations view? My bank gives operations no ID or "number" hence that is always empty and I have to hide that column again and again which is anoying.

The answer is yes to both questions. Please have a look at the "Save customized content" in the online doc.

Milian Wolff wrote:Thanks, I am confident that I will be able to use skrooge at least with some additional scripting on my side. Cheers, thanks for working on this!

You're welcome, if anything remained unclear, please ask

Thanks for the answers!

I managed to write me a script that takes the monthly PDF reports and pipes them through "pdftotext" then parses its output. Finally, it outputs a CSV that I can import in skrooge. The script also does the automatic categorization and some simple post processing.

Neat, with such a "good" data set in skrooge I finally managed to produce some useful reports. By bookmarking them I can easily bring them up again - cool.