booqfx

Fast transaction download for boobank.

Use case

• Do you use boobank the great bank management software ?
• Do you have a large number of accounts ?
• Are you tired of waiting for boobank to complete ?
• Are you tired of having to import multiple OFX/QFX files ?
• Would you wish that account balances are import properly ?

If any of the above rings a bell, then booqfx is for you.

Parallelization

booqfx will run multiple instances of boobank in parallel to avoid wasting time while your bank Web site responds. If you have a large number of accounts, this can dramatically improve OFX/QFX download, by up to an order of magnitude. Web browsers use a similar technique to speed up Web page download.

In practice, booqfx uses Unix's command parallel to ensure efficient and safe parallelization of boobank.

Single OFX/QFX

It is not enough to just run several instances of boobank in parallel, but we also want to generate one single OFX/QFX file instead of the many OFX files that each instance of boobank will create.

booqfx.sh redirects the output of the many instances of boobank to the following file:

~/Downloads/boobank.qfx

It also uses sed to format the file so that it can be imported into financial programs like Quicken.

Configuration

When you first run booqfx.sh, it will use boobank to retrieve all the accounts that you have configured previously in boobank. It will cache this information so that subsequent calls to booqfx are faster.

It will also create the following file:

~/.boobank_accountids.txt

This file contains the identifiers of the accounts that will be downloaded each time you run booqfx.sh. If you want to download only some of the accounts, edit the file and delete the accounts that you do not want to download.

Update

When you configure new accounts in boobank, they will not be picked up automatically by booqfx. You need to remove the following file, and then run booqfx.sh again:

rm ~/.boobank_accounts.json

Installation

You need to install parallel, jq, gnu-sed, fping and, obviously, weboob.

On mac OS:

brew install parallel jq gnu-sed fping weboob

Usage

Either run booqfx.sh from the command line, or booqfx.command from the Finder if you are on macOS.