Plaid2QIF

Description

Plaid2QIF downloads transactions from various financial institutions in JSON format and converts to formats usable by financial software.

Output Formats supported:

• QIF
• CSV
• JSON
• Extensible to others

Notes

• Tested extensively with GnuCash. Supported by any financial software that supports import from QIF.
• Supports any institution supported by Plaid.

Summary

  # Download transactions in various formats (default QIF) from Plaid
  plaid2qif download \
    --account=<account-name> \
    --account-type=<type> \
    --account-id=<acct-id> \
    --from=<from-date> \
    --to=<to-date> \
    [--output-format=<format>] \
    [--output-dir=<path>] \
    [--ignore-pending] \
    [--verbose]

Usage

1. Install the plaid2qif command using pip

    $ pip install plaid2qif
   

2. Authenticate and link with your financial institution (first time only). To do this, follow the steps for using the associated Account Linker tool.

3. Configure your environment with required values. See "Authentication Configuration" below.

4. Once configured, you're ready to download transactions and save them as QIF files:

    plaid2qif download \
        --from=<yyyy-mm-dd> \
        --to=<yyyy-mm-dd> \
        --account-type=<type> \
        --account=<account-name> \
        --account-id=<plaid-account-id> \
        --credentials=<file>
   

• account is the path to an account in the ledger in GnuCash that you ultimately want to import the transactions to. This is added to the !Account header in the QIF file. e.g.: Assets: Checking Accounts:Personal Checking Account. If the name has spaces be sure to quote this param.
• account-type is a GnuCash account identifier type as documented here.
• account-id is Plaid's account ID for the account you want to download, as obtained via list-accounts above.
• By default, output will go to stdout to be redirected. If you want it to be written to a location use the output-dir parameter.

Authentication Configuration

• You will need the following information configured in your environment in order to use this tool.
• The suggested way to populate your environment would be to use a file named .env in your current working directory. Alternatively you could put the values in your ~/.profile or however you normally initialize your environment.

Configuration Parameter	Environment Variable Name	Description	Notes
Client ID	PLAID_CLIENT_ID	Plaid's unique indentifier for your Plaid account. Obtain from your dashboard	Required.
Client Secret	PLAID_SECRET	Plaid's authentication token for your Plaid account. Obtain from your dashboard	Required.
Plaid Environment	PLAID_ENV	Operating environment.	Optional. Should be one of: sandbox, development, or production. Defaults to development.
Plaid API Version	PLAID_API_VERSION	Version of the API that the plaid-python library supports.	Optional. Defaults to 2020-09-14
Access Token location	ACCESS_TOKEN_FILE	Location of the token that grants access to a particular financial institution for downloading records from.	Required.

Notes on Authentication Configuration

• The access token and Plaid credentials are sensitive material as they grant access to data within your financial accounts. They should be handled carefully and not shared.

• These are the most important values that need configuration in order to authenticate with your institution and then download records. Other values can be found in the sample.env.

• If you're downloading from different institutions that result in multiple access token files, you can override the location of the file at the command line; see below for an example. This approach is open to suggestions for improvement if this doesn't work well for others. See Issue #27.

    $ ACCESS_TOKEN_FILE=./cfg/chase.txt plaid2qif ...
    $ ACCESS_TOKEN_FILE=./cfg/citi.txt plaid2qif ...
  

Distribution

# increment version in `plaid2qif/__init__.py`
# commit everything & push
$ git tag -s vX.Y.Z
$ git push --tags
$ python3 setup.py sdist bdist_wheel
$ twine upload dist/*