ynab-api-import

This library enables importing YNAB transactions via the Gocardless Bank Account Data API (formerly Nordigen). It is pretty helpful for cases in which your bank is not covered by YNABs native import functionality.

Preparations

Gocardless Bank Account API (formerly Nordigen)

1. Check if your bank is supported by the API.
2. Create an account with Gocardless for the Bank Account Data API (They have a separate Login for it which you can get to by clicking on 'Get API Keys' or clicking the link at the bottom of their standard login page)
3. Go to Developers -> User Secrets and create a new pair of secret_id and secret_key

YNAB

1. Create a personal access token for YNAB as described here

Basic Usage

1. Install library from PyPI

pip install ynab-api-import

2. Initiate Library

Provide a unique reference (e.g. 'mycheckingaccount') per bank connection to identify the grant later on. You can find the IDs of your budget and the account if you go to https://app.ynab.com/ and open the target account by clicking on the name on the left hand side menu. The URL does now contain both IDs https://app.ynab. com/<budget_id>/accounts/<account_id>

from ynabapiimport import YnabApiImport
ynab_api_import = YnabApiImport(secret_id='<secret_id>', 
                                secret_key='<secret_key>',
                                reference='<reference>',
                                token='<ynab_token>',
                                budget_id='<budget_id>',
                                account_id='<account_id>')

Optionally you can initiate an object from a config.yaml file. To do that create a YAML file with the following content:

secret_id: <secret_id>
secret_key: <secret_key>
reference: <reference>
token: <ynab_token>
budget_id: <budget_id>
account_id: <account_id>

Save the file and provide the path to the library when initializing

ynab_api_import = YnabApiImport.from_yaml('path/to/config.yaml')

2. Find the institution_id of your bank

Countrycode is ISO 3166 two-character country code.

ynab_api_import.fetch_institutions(countrycode='<countrycode>')

You get back a dictionary with all available banks in that country, their institution_ids and the maximum days of transaction history provided by the bank. Find and save the institution_id of your bank.

[{'name': '<name>', 'institution_id': '<institution_id>', 'max_history_days': 'ddd'}]

3. Create Auth Link and authenticate with your bank

Provide the institution_id. You get back a link which you need to copy to your browser and go through authentication flow with your bank. By default, the authorization will allow you to fetch 90 days of your transaction history. You can set the option use_max_historical_days to True in order to fetch longer transaction history. This is known to cause issues sometimes, so in case you get an 500 error from the Gocardless API try an authorization with default 90 days.

ynab_api_import.create_auth_link(institution_id='<institution_id>')

4. Run import with your reference and YNAB identifiers

Optionally you can provide a startdate argument in form of a datetime.date object to only import transactions from a specific date onwards. Equally optionally you can provide a memo_regex argument in from of a regex string to the call to clean the memo string before importing into YNAB. A good helper to write your regex is
https://regex101.com

ynab_api_import.import_transactions()

Advanced Usage

Handling of multiple accounts in your bank connection (MultipleAccountsError)

The library assumes that you have one active account in your bank connection. It will raise an error if there are no accounts in your connection or more than one. In the latter case you need to provide the correct resource_id when initializing the library. You can find the resource_id by looking into the available options in the error message.

from ynabapiimport import YnabApiImport
ynab_api_import = YnabApiImport(resource_id='<resource_id>',
                                secret_id='<secret_id>', 
                                secret_key='<secret_key>',
                                reference='<reference>',
                                token='<ynab_token>',
                                budget_id='<budget_id>',
                                account_id='<account_id>')

Compare balances

This method will fetch the available balance variants for your account from the API and compare them to the balance in YNAB. It compares the plain balance values as well as the balances minus the sum of still pending transactions. If none of them match it raises a BalancesDontMatchError

ynab_api_import.compare_balances()

Delete current bank authorization

By default you can create only one bank authorization per reference. If you need to replace the authorization under your current reference you can explicitly do that by setting the delete_current_auth option when creating an auth link.

ynab_api_import.create_auth_link(institution_id='<institution_id>', delete_current_auth=True)

Show Logs

The library logs information about the result of the methods on the 'INFO' level. If you want to see these logs import the logging module and set it to the level INFO. You can also access the logger for advanced configuration via the logger attribute of your YnabApiImportinstance.

import logging

logging.basicConfig(level='INFO')

Testing your memo_regex

You can test your memo_regex with a call to test_memo_regex(). The function will fetch transactions from your bank account, apply the regex and output the old and new memo strings in a dictionary for inspection.

ynab_api_import.test_memo_regex(memo_regex=r'<memo_regex')

returns a list of dict with following content

[{original_memo: cleaned_memo}]