Importing Stock Transactions Into Gnucash With Python

Posted on Sun 21 June 2020 in hints

I use GnuCash, but keeping my 401(k) accounts up to date has always been a tedious, manual process.

I came up with the python snippet below to handle the import, but it was a pain to write since I couldn't find any examples for setting up stock or mutual fund transactions.

The SetSharePriceAndAmount method ended up being key, and I only found that by searching through the gnucash source.

The GncNumeric class also ended up being more of a pain to use than I expected. There's probably a better way to use it, but the 'multiple values by 1000000/100000' approach is working for me now.

I'm using the stock GnuCash and python-gnucash version 2.6.19 available in Ubuntu 18.04, so this stuck using python 2.7.

#!/usr/bin/python2.7

import csv
from datetime import datetime

import gnucash

session = gnucash.Session("xml://yourfile.gnucash")
book = session.book
root_account = book.get_root_account()

usd = book.get_table().lookup('ISO4217','USD')

# There's probably a better way to use 'Your:Retirement:Contributions' instead ....
contrib_acct = root_account.lookup_by_name("Your").lookup_by_name("Retirement").lookup_by_name("Contributions")

parent_acct = root_account.lookup_by_name("401k")

with open('your_transactions.csv', 'rb') as trans_csv:
  trans_reader = csv.reader(trans_csv, delimiter=',')

  # Skip over the first row since it's headers
  header = next(trans_reader)

  for description, date, fund_name, share_price_str, share_amount_str, amount_str in trans_reader:
    child_account = parent_acct.lookup_by_name(fund_name)

    posting_date = datetime.strptime(date,"%m/%d/%y")

    tx = gnucash.Transaction(book)
    tx.BeginEdit()

    tx.SetCurrency(usd)

    tx.SetDatePostedTS(posting_date)
    tx.SetDescription(description)

    sp1 = gnucash.Split(book)
    sp1.SetParent(tx)
    sp1.SetAccount(child_account)

    # GncNumeric(n,d) represents numbers as fractions of the form n/d, so GncNumeric(1234567/1000000) = 1.234567
    # There's probably a better way to do this...
    share_price = gnucash.GncNumeric(float(share_price_str)*(10**6), 10**6)
    share_amount = gnucash.GncNumeric(float(share_amount_str)*(10**6), 10**6)

    # share_price * share_amount == amount, so I could have used that instead using the value from the csv
    amount = gnucash.GncNumeric(float(amount_str)*(10**6), 10**6)

    # ( ˘▽˘)っ♨  This is the secret sauce for setting the number of shares and the price.
    sp1.SetSharePriceAndAmount(share_price, share_amount)

    sp2 = gnucash.Split(book)
    sp2.SetParent(tx)
    sp2.SetAccount(contrib_acct)
    sp2.SetValue(amount.neg())

    tx.CommitEdit()
session.save()
session.end()

Special thanks to this post for providing most of the code above.

hint python gnucash