Gnucash to Beancount

This project can convert a Gnucash sql file into a new beancount file. It is not intended to continuously import gnucash data into an existing beancount ledger, as this script will also add plugins and beancount options to the beginning of the file. This project started with the intention to convert a gnucash csv export, but it turned out that the csv exported from gnucash is not quite reliable. Read more about that at in the section Unreliable Export. Because of that I refactored it to use the piecash library. With that it has the same goal as the already existing repository from henriquebastos/gnucash-to-beancount. The implementation in this repository does offer few configuration options though.

One downside I have encountered sofar are stock splits. Those are currently not supported and have to be added manually to the output by following the official documentation Beancount Stock Splits. Luckily those splits don't happen too often.

Prerequisite

Your gnucash file must be in a sql format. I implemented it with a sqlite3 file, which was saved by GnuCash v5.4. If your current genucash file is not in the right format it is always possible to just save it as a sqlite3 file.

Install

To install gnucash to beancount simply use pip:

pip install g2b

Test with g2b --version if the installation was successful.

Usage

Create Configuration for g2b

In order for a successful conversion you need to create a yaml configuration file. An example would look like this:

converter:
  loglevel: INFO
gnucash:  # here you can specify details about your gnucash export
  default_currency: EUR
  thousands_symbol: "."
  decimal_symbol: ","
  reconciled_symbol: "b"
  not_reconciled_symbol: "n"
  account_rename_patterns:  # Here you can rename accounts that might not align with the beancount format
    - ["OpenBalance", "Equity:Opening-Balance"]
    - ["Money@[Bank]", "Assets:Money at Bank"]
  non_default_account_currencies:  # Here you have to name all accounts that deviate from the default currency
    Assets:Cash:Wallet: "NZD"
beancount:  # here you can add beancount options, plugins and events that should be added to output file
  flag_postings: false  # if false, will set all transactions automatically to '*' (default: true)
  options:
    - ["title", "Exported GnuCash Book"]  # options should be key value pairs
    - ["operating_currency", "EUR"]
  plugins:
    - "beancount.plugins.check_commodity"  # plugins can be named directly
    - "beancount.plugins.coherent_cost"
    - "beancount.plugins.nounused"
    - "beancount.plugins.auto"
  events:
    2024-05-05: type description string  # optional events that should be added to the output, the
                                         # first space is used to split between space and description
fava:  # optional configuration specific to fava
  commodity-precision: 3  # set the render precision of values for the fava web-frontend

Execute g2b

Once you created the needed configuration file you can call:

g2b -i book.gnucash -c config.yaml -o my.beancount

The script will, at the end, automatically call beancount to parse and verify the export, such that you know if the conversion was successful or not.

Limitations

Currently, this project can not deal with stock splits. Those will not be added to the beancount output and have to be added manually. To do that follow the official Documentation.

Unreliable Gnucash CSV Export

While starting out with CSV exports I found the following issues that kept me from progressing with the CSV exports.

• The gnucash csv export does not offer reliable currency information. Transaction with values like 100 $ cannot be properly understood as it, for example, could be USD or NZD. An offical bug report is open since 2017: gnucash bug - use ISO 4217 currency symbols in output.
• The Rate/Price value is sometimes added to the wrong posting in transactions with multiple currencies. Because of that it wasn't easily recognizable how to convert which prices.
• And probably the most severe issue: Some transactions were completely missing inside the export. As I couldn't figure out why I decided to use the piecash library.