go-moneywell

A Go (golang) API for programmatic access to a MoneyWell document, along with various tools leveraging this API to improve common workflows in using MoneyWell.

This project is in no way affiliated with No Thirst Software.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

You need to install Go. If you're using MoneyWell, you're also using OSX, so use the Homebrew package manager and simply:

brew install go

Installation

To install go-moneywell for the command line tools, use go install:

go install github.com/lieut-data/go-moneywell/cmd/moneywellcli
go install github.com/lieut-data/go-moneywell/cmd/moneywelldoctor

To install go-moneywell for the api, use go get:

go get github.com/lieut-data/go-moneywell/api

Running

To analyze a MoneyWell document for problems, use moneywelldoctor:

moneywelldoctor Finances.moneywell

To dump various data from a MoneyWell document, use moneywellcli:

moneywellcli -file Finances.moneywell -list accounts
moneywellcli -file Finances.moneywell -list buckets
moneywellcli -file Finances.moneywell -list tags
moneywellcli -file Finances.moneywell -list account-groups
moneywellcli -file Finances.moneywell -list bucket-groups
moneywellcli -file Finances.moneywell -list transactions
moneywellcli -file Finances.moneywell -list recurrence-rules
moneywellcli -file Finances.moneywell -list spending-plan

Optionally filter transactions by account, bucket or tag:

moneywellcli -file Finances.moneywell -list transactions -account "Chequing"
moneywellcli -file Finances.moneywell -list transactions -bucket "Salary"
moneywellcli -file Finances.moneywell -list transactions -tag "family_vacation_2017"

Command-line Tools

moneywelldoctor

In short, moneywelldoctor is designed to solve this problem:

MoneyWell always warns when the account and bucket totals are mismatched. Most of the time, this is simply because there are some newly entered transactions against accounts in the cash flow that have not been assigned a bucket. MoneyWell provides a helpful Unassigned smart filter to track these down.

Unfortunately, there are other ways to create such an imbalance, all of which moneywelldoctor is designed to detect:

• A split transaction whose children do not sum to the transaction amount.
• A transfer between accounts both inside or outside the cash flow that is incorrectly assigned a bucket.
• A transfer between an account inside the cash flow and an account outside the cash flow that is missing a bucket.
• A transaction incorrectly marked as bucket optional.

Finding these issues previously involved a "binary search" through Time Machine to discover which transaction introduced the imbalance, or giving up and resetting the cash flow start date. Given the path to a *.moneywell document, moneywelldoctor will instead pin down exactly what transactions are at fault:

WARNING: transaction[3] on 2017-11-19 against Chequing for -$100.01 CAD (Cash Rebate) is not fully split (off by -$0.01 CAD)
WARNING: transfer[15] on 2017-11-19 against Cash Account for -$50.00 CAD (Withdrawal for buying movie tickets) between accounts in the cash flow should not be assigned to a bucket

Note that moneywelldoctor will not make any changes to the given MoneyWell document. Any transactions identified must be then fixed within MoneyWell itself.

moneywellcli

The bundled moneywellcli is largely an exercise of the api package. It supports various operations, dumping the resulting data structures to STDOUT:

moneywellcli -file Finances.moneywell -list accounts
moneywellcli -file Finances.moneywell -list buckets
moneywellcli -file Finances.moneywell -list tags
moneywellcli -file Finances.moneywell -list account-groups
moneywellcli -file Finances.moneywell -list bucket-groups
moneywellcli -file Finances.moneywell -list transactions
moneywellcli -file Finances.moneywell -list transactions -account "Chequing"
moneywellcli -file Finances.moneywell -list transactions -bucket "Salary"
moneywellcli -file Finances.moneywell -list transactions -tag "family_vacation_2017"
moneywellcli -file Finances.moneywell -list recurrence-rules
moneywellcli -file Finances.moneywell -list spending-plan
moneywellcli -file Finances.moneywell -list spending-plan -bucket "Tech"

The API to this command line tool is subject to change. A future revision will likely support CSV encoding for export to spreadsheets along with JSON encoding for integration with other scripts.

Packages

api

The command line tools above depend on the primary export of this repository: a read-only, programmatic API into a MoneyWell document. A MoneyWell document is itself a Core Data SQLite database. You can inspect the contents of this database by installing sqlite (if necessary):

brew install sqlite

and then opening the persistentStore database therein:

sqlite3 api/Test.moneywell/StoreContent/persistentStore

Within the sqlite shell, you can list the tables using .tables, and run queries such as:

SELECT * FROM ZBUCKET;

This API is effectively a low-level wrapper around such queries, taking into account knowledge about how MoneyWell arranges its data model. The API is currently read-only and compatible with documents readable to at least MoneyWell 3.0.5.

For detailed documentation on the API, see the generated GoDoc.

Note that nothing precludes a future version of this API from writing to the MoneyWell document. A logical place to start would be tag management: MoneyWell makes it hard to see all tags and remove or rename tags in bulk.

TODO

Some random notes on things in the API yet to be tackled:

• Add support for querying favourite transactions.
• Fix order of hidden buckets relative to other buckets.
• Fix sorting of accounts outside of account groups.
• Fix sorting of buckets outside of bucket groups.
• Make the bucket event order fully match MoneyWell's own listing within a given day.
• Determine why the sqlite3 driver leaves persistentStore-wal and persistentStore-shm around.
• Update moneywelldoctor to warn about scheduled transactions in the past

Authors

• Jesse Hallam (keybase.io/lieutdata)

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md file for details.