This is an update on the expenses package for Emacs for keeping track of expenses. Since the last post on this package there have been a few new features added to the package which might make it more useful for some users.

Importing bank statements

A major feature that is added is the ability to import bank statements from CSV file using expenses-import-expense. This interactive function asks for few values so that it can correctly import the dates, amount, category and details to the expense file. These values are

  • column no for amount/debit
  • column no for dates
  • format of dates
  • column no for details/narrative (optional)
  • column no for category (optional)

Column no starts at 0. If there is no details or category column then use a negative number. In this case it will ask for providing details and category.

There is also an option to turn on auto-assign feature for category. It will then automatically try to assign a category based on the details of an entry.

(setq expenses-utils-auto-assign-categories-on-import t)

The auto assigning of category works by looking for known keywords and phrases in the details/narratives. One can create an alist of phrases or a hash table of keywords to make this auto assign work better.

(setq expenses-utils-phrases-alist '(("THE FIRST PHRASE" . "Category1") ("THE SECOND PHRASE" . "Category2") ("ANOTHER PHRASE" . "Category3")))

(require ht)
(setq expenses-utils-keyword-category-ht (ht ("KEYWORD1" "Category1")
                                             ("KEYWORD2" "Category2"))

Importing bank statements could be made even easier by setting a profile for each of your account. In this profile you describe how to assign different columns while importing. For example

(setq expenses-bank-profiles (("EXAMPLE-BANK" "," 1 3 "dd/mm/yyyy" 2 -1) ("ANOTHER-BANK" "\t" 1 4 "yyyy/mm/dd" 2 3)))

The variable expenses-bank-profiles is a list where each element is of the form (bank-name sep date-col debit-col date-format narrative-col category-col) . One can then use expenses-import-expense-with-bank-profile and choose a bank name from the above list to import the statement.

Filtering expenses by categories

One can now filter the expenses for a whole year by one or more categories. Also the expenses filtered by categories are now listed from most expenses to least expenses.