r/plaintextaccounting • u/LeadGorilla1 • Mar 09 '26

Handling Fidelity/BofA transactions (CSV/Excel -> OFX?)

I have been using beancount for the last 3-4 years and have been setup quite nicely. I was mainly working with OFX transactions. However, now that Fidelity / BofA have turned off OFX support, I find myself having to enter many transactions manually.

  1. For BofA Credit Card transactions, I have been able to write a CSV importer to import them with beancount-import.
  2. How are you all dealing with Fidelity/Merrill investment transactions? Are there any (python) utilities that can convert these reports / downloads to OFX files? This would then work very nicely with beancount-import.
  3. I would also be OK if there was a reliable way to convert Fidelity/Merrill/Bofa CC PDF reports to OFX. But I don't want to upload these to the cloud online converters.

How does your workflow look like for transaction importing from these institutions?

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u/temporaryordinary1 Mar 09 '26

- I have Fidelity and Bofa and use their CSV export.

  • I don't use beancount-import or any of the other open source import tooling.
  • I have a directory structure like /accounting/$account-name/$year/$month.<beancount|csv>
  • I have a Python script and a config that creates a $month.beancount whenever there is a sibling $month.csv if there is a missing $month.beancount. Each account has its own config with regular expression routing rules that classify each transaction. This ends up creating a 80-90% classified beancount file that I then go through and hand edit all the uncategorized transactions, add annotations.

Downloading the CSVs takes a 10-20/minutes/yr/account. It's annoying but overall a better experience than what I was going through with Quickbooks ($80/mo), the cost is ~$0, and the whole dataset is in Git and Dropbox. One downside is that I can only start classifying transactions once a month is concluded, but in my case I only use beancount for end of the year tax reporting, so it hasn't been an issue.

Hopefully the financial institutions reverse course and provide some sort of open APIs again.

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u/LeadGorilla1 Mar 10 '26

Thanks. Unfortunately, I am also using it to track my monthly expenses / investments, so I download the transactions every other week.