"Shareworks" is a product of Morgan Stanley which tracks certain kinds of financial information (specifically, stock and compentation-related information) and distributes reports about it to the receiptients.
Inscruitably, it offers this in two formats: a PDF, and an HTML page. Both of them have tables in a format that will make your accountant absolutely scream -- they're not in rows; there'd be a ton of manual data re-entry; it's just no good. There is no CSV export, or anything you'd expect.
This is a program that takes the HTML form, parses it, puts it into a sane columnar layout, and emits the data in CSV.
That's it.
You can then open the CSV in Excel, or LibreOffice, or whatever you please.
We're talking about the data exports from a piece of software that's A) by a major financial company, and B) literally has no purpose except data reporting...
and I'm telling you that their exports are too batshit for an accountant to actually use?
Yes. Yes I am.
I'm not kidding about turning dozens of pages into a few rows in the CSV form, either. It's really obscene.
I cannot begin to speculate on what kind of failure of organization inside Morgan Stanley caused them to utterly fail to be able to do something like "emit a CSV report", but fail they did.
This is not software that should've needed to be written.
None the less, it was needed; and so I have written it.
While I do hope you are not in the position of needing this, if you do, it is a free and open license.
More specifically: Apache2 or MIT licensed, at your option.
I really don't care what you do with it; I just want to increase the amount of sanity in the world, and this is a contribution.
- You still have to log into the Shareworks website manually, and navigate to the reports, and save that webpage from your browser.
- You'll need Git and a Golang compiler installed and some basic familiarity with working in the terminal. (I couldn't be arsed to package this any better. Sorry.)
In other words, this will require you to be somewhat technical, still.
If you'd like to make this more automated and easier to use, "PRs welcome", as we say in the tech industry.
- Log in to Shareworks.
- Get the report onto your screen.
- Click "Activity" at the top.
- Click "Reports".
- Do the date selection to whatever you want.
- Leave the other options as "Web Page" and "Full".
- Submit.
- Now it gets fun. We need the HTML from this, but we can't just save the page.
- (Why can't we just save the page? Because this website... it's incredible, in a bad way. I don't wanna talk about it. This is not how this website should've been written.)
- Right-click somewhere in the report data, and then click "inspect".
- Some crazy debugger thing just opened. If you don't know what this is, don't worry, just hang on.
- Scroll up until you see something that says
<iframe id="transaction-statement-iframe(... and then some more stuff you can ignore; it just has to start like this). - Scroll slightly back down: You should see a bit that says
<htmlright underneath the<iframe. Right click on that. - Hover "Copy" in the right-click menu, then click "Inner HTML" -- or "Copy element" in Chrome. (Whatever.) You should now have a big hunk of juicy data on your clipboard! We're almost there!
- Dizzy? See the screenshot below.
- Paste that data from your clipboard into a file and save it. Call it
wow.htmlor whatever you want.- If you're not very tech savvy -- mind that this needs to be a "plain text" file. Not a word document or whatever. If that's not familar to you, I'm sorry; this is beyond my depth to explain in this readme.
- HOORAY -- you are done with the browser now. You can close it.
Here's a screenshot of what getting the raw HTML looks like:
Okay. Phew. Now on to actually running the munger.
- Git clone this repo, if you haven't already.
- If you're not the kind of tech savvy for this -- I'm sorry; this is beyond my depth to explain in this readme.
- You should have Golang installed. Sanitycheck: you can run
go envin the terminal, and it works, right?- If you're not the kind of tech savvy for this -- I'm sorry; this is beyond my depth to explain in this readme.
go run ./main.go ./wow.html-- or use whatever your filename was from step 4 above, when you got the data.- That's it! The CSV data should've appeared on your terminal!
- Redirect it to a file to save it:
go run ./main.go ./wow.html > sane.csv
You should now be able to open sane.csv with Excel, or LibreOffice, or whatever you want!
And you can go ahead and send it to your accountant; they won't hate you anymore.
(Probably. At least not for this issue.)
This code is provided 'without warranty', etc. I hope it works. It certainly appears to. But double-check with your own eyes. I'm not responsible for the correctness of your tax filings. Shareworks could change the format and break this tool and I might not notice; etc. Final responsibility is yours.
(Also, honestly, just double check against the PDF or whatnot to make sure you didn't accidentally miss copying some of the HTML! It's too easy.)
UPDATE: the parser has been improved. But some caveats about the actual informational content remain.
If you have more than one kind of share/security/token/whatever in the Shareworks report --
this is the stuff you'll find in headings outside of any of the tables in the document --
this munger does not currently parse this, and such info will be missing from the CSV.
At this time, you have to re-add this manually.
Partly this is because it's a pain to parse.
Partly it's because the relevant information just flat out isn't in the document.
(I know, I know. This is insane. I agree.)
PRs welcome to fix the first part.
There's nothing we can do about the information being not present, except share this warning.
Now, as to why the relevant information -- the distinct share kinds -- aren't in the document:
The headings aren't the share kinds. They're the names of the process that's distributing them.
What?
Yeah, so, for example, you might be receiving two kinds of shares, let's call them XYZ and XWZ, but have three processes distributing them to you: some P1 and P2 and P3, and P1 and P2 both grant you XYZ shares (but on different schedules), and P3 grants you XWZ shares.
You almost certainly need to keep the XYZ shares and the XWZ shares separate in your bookkeeping, because when you calculate something like capital loss and capital gains for tax purposes, you cannot mix them (they're different things with different values!).
But you're at the mercy of your accounting department to tell you what the mapping is from {the distribution schedule name} to {whatever the actual stock is}.