Betterment is a nice brokerage service but they don't provide transaction data in any parseable, structured format. The Python script here will parse your quarterly statement, deposit and dividend PDFs and produce CSV files suitable for importing into an accounting program.
This is super hackish and brittle and this should really just be thought of as a starting point, and not as a genuinely usable tool.
You'll need Python 3 and the pdftotext utility. I use Ubuntu Linux and
pdftotext is available in the poppler-utils package. In some other
OS, you'll need to work out on your own how to extract text from the
PDF.
// Will output to a file called transactions.csv
python3 betterment-pdf-to-csv.py *.pdf
Betterment seems to round the number of shares transacted and internally record more precision. I have seen on my statement the following:
Reported transactions (all purchases):
| price | num shares | amount |
|---|---|---|
| 92.20 | .057 | 5.30 |
| 92.62 | .057 | 5.30 |
| 93.05 | .055 | 5.10 |
Betterment reported a total increase of .170 shares -- but
.057 + .057 + .055 = .169!
However, if you use the amount and the price, you get a total of 0.169516035336005 shares, which rounds to .170.
In another case, I saw this:
- Reported starting balance: .005 shares (1 previous transaction)
- Reported total purchases: .010 shares (2 transactions of .005 shares)
- Reported ending balance: .014 shares
Yikes! Using price and amounts, you get (to 6 decimal places)
.56/120.41 + .56/122.8 + .62/120.67 = 0.004651 + 0.004560 + 0.005138
= 0.014349
So it does look like they are using units smaller than .001 shares.
Because their reported number of shares isn't accurate, this program ignores that number and calculates the number of shares to six decimal places using the share price and dollar amount.