Recently I started using Homebank, a great and free personal finance tool, to keep track of my budget and spending habits. It takes a little effort to set up but is really intuitive and straightforward from there.
I started tracking all my spendings and transactions in Homebank a couple of months ago which helped me getting started with Homebank. Tracking all transactions manually, however, felt really cumbersome; especially when tracking a fair amount of transactions if you haven’t updated Homebank in a while.
Sensing that there must be a better way to track your spendings and earnings in Homebank I decided to investigate a little bit. And as it turns out, there is a better way. My findings might be helpful for others so I thought I might share.
Step 1: Export your account data as CSV
To get your transactions from your DKB account into Homebank you need to export your account data as a CSV file. This can easily be done using the DKB’s online banking interface. Just go to “Kontoumsätze” (for a DKB Cash account) or “Kreditkartenumsätze” (for a Visa account), enter the desired time frame for your report and then hit the little arrow icon in the top right corner (just beneath the printer icon). This will download a CSV file that we can convert and then import into Homebank.
Step 2: Download the dkb2homebank converter
Unfortunately the downloaded files are not compatible with Homebank’s CSV import interface. If you try to import the DKB generated CSV files right away, Homebank will simply refuse to do so as it does not recognize the file as a proper transactions file.
Luckily the Homebank developer has written a specification of the CSV import interface. It seems fairly complete and allowed me to write a little converter script that converts the DKB’s CSV file into a Homebank ready CSV file.
Download the latest version (right click -> Save Link as…) of the converter script and save it on your computer. It’s written in Python and requires you to have Python >= 2.7.4 installed. I’ve tested it with Homebank 5.0.0 on a Linux machine but expect it to work on other operating systems with a similar Homebank version as well.
Step 3: Convert the CSV file
Now that you’ve downloaded the dkb2homebank script, you can use it to convert the DKB’s CSV file to a Homebank readable one. To run the script, call it as described in the readme file on github. You need to provide the type of the CSV file (currently DKB cash account exports and Visa account exports are supported) and the filename of the respective CSV file:
./dkb2homebank.py --cash yourCashFile.csv
or for Visa account exports:
./dkb2homebank.py --visa yourVisaFile.csv
Each of these commands will create a output file called either cashHomebank.csv for DKB Cash
accounts or visaHomebank.csv for Visa accounts.
Step 4: Import the converted CSV file into Homebank
You can import the newly created CSV files into Homebank using its import dialog (File -> Import -> CSV file…). This dialog will guide you through the import process. Make sure that you select the correct account to which the imported data should be added.
After that all your transactions are imported into your Homebank file. You can now start tagging them as you like to help you get an overview of all your spendings and earnings.
What else?
If you discover any problems, just contact me or file a bug report on the dkb2homebank GitHub repo. You can also try to fix or improve stuff yourself and send me a pull request.
Was this helpful? Feel free to drop me a line!