Personal finances management with HomeBank

I recently discovered HomeBank, a free and user-friendly personal finance management tool that allows you to easily track your accounting, budget, and finances, and it offers several useful features:

1. HomeBank is a free software. Free as in freedom.
2. It's a desktop application. So no need to configure yet another web server.
3. Comes with a beautiful GTK UI. A native look for Gnome Shell users.
4. Available in the Debian repositories. Just apt install it.

Importing bank statements

Here comes the tricky part; various banks utilize distinct formats for their bank statements. My bank is ASN Bank, a Dutch online bank that is known for its focus on sustainability and socially responsible banking practices. ASN Bank allows you to download bank statements in several formats:

1. PDF
2. CSV
3. CAMT.053 (ISO 20022)

HomeBank can import the following formats:

1. QIF
2. OFX/QFX
3. CSV

Unfortunately, HomeBank was unable to import ASN's bank statements in CSV format. The CSV format that HomeBank expects is specific to HomeBank, so this will never work out of the box. So we're left with CAMT.053.

Converting CAMT.053 to OFX

Fortunately you can easily convert CAMT.053 files to QFX format with the ofxstatement command-line tool. On Debian, the ofxstatement-plugins package includes the iso20022 plugin, so all you need to do is:

sudo apt install ofxstatement ofxstatement-plugins
ofxstatement convert -t iso20022 statement.xml statement.ofx

For convenience, let's add that to a Makefile:

Makefile Usage

%.ofx: %.xml
    @ofxstatement convert -t iso20022 $< $@

$ make statement.ofx
INFO: Conversion completed: (372 lines) statement.xml

Success. You can now import statement.ofx into HomeBank.