For my personal finance, I use an app called You Need A Budget, or YNAB. It works pretty well for my needs, but seems to regularly have problems importing transactions from my American Express card. In a fit of frustration, I built a little app to conver the AmEx CSV format to the format that YNAB needs, and thought I would share it here.
- Log into Amex
- Click on "Statements and Activity"
- Click on "Recent Transactiosn"
- Click the download button second from the right
- Choose CSV and do NOT check the checkbox
- Transactions will now be downloaded
./convert-amex-to-ynab.py ./sample.csv
Or, to run the script without cloning this repo:
curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dmuth/export-amex-to-ynab/master/convert-amex-to-ynab.py | python3 - ./sample.csv > ynab.csv
Either invocation will read a CSV file that you downloaded form AmEx and write to stdout a CSV file that YNAB can understand.
- Run the script as detailed above and put the output into a file called
ynab.csvor similar. - Log into YNAB in your web browser and go into "All Accounts"
- Click "Import" and click "Choose File"
- Choose the account to import to and click the "Import" button.
- The transactions will be uploaded and you should now see them in YNAB.
- Sometimes YNAB has difficulty parsing transaction dates, but it will ask you to confirm
- Sometimes YNAB doesn't correctly de-dup transactions. In that case, just sort by date, look for duplicate numbers, and delete one.