money

A personal finance tracker built around bank statements rather than manual entry.

You keep a data directory with one folder per account, drop statement exports into those folders, and run money import. Transactions are extracted and tagged by glob rules you write.

Layout

~/money/                     # the data root (see "Where the data root lives")
  rules.toml                 # tag rules and transfer definitions, in order
  index.db                   # SQLite index (rebuildable; safe to delete*)
  checking/
    account.toml             # currency + which parser reads this bank's exports
    2026-01.csv
    2026-02.csv
  savings/
    account.toml
    2026-01.csv

* Nothing lives only in the index: it is derived entirely from the statements plus rules.toml, so deleting it and re-importing gets you exactly what you had. It is a cache and nothing more, which is why it is never migrated — if a new build changes its shape, delete it and run money import again.

Where the data root lives

Checked in order, first one wins:

1. --root DIR on the command line
2. $MONEY_ROOT
3. the root key in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/money/config.toml, which is ~/.config/money/config.toml unless XDG_CONFIG_HOME says otherwise
4. ~/money

So the usual setup is to write the config file once and never pass a flag again:

# ~/.config/money/config.toml
root = "~/documents/finances"

A leading ~ is expanded and relative paths are made absolute. money config prints the resolved root and which of the four rules chose it.

Install

go install ./cmd/money

Give it the package path, not cmd/money/main.go. Naming the file puts the go tool in file mode: it names the binary after the source file (main) and compiles only the files listed, which breaks the moment the package has two.

Usage

money                        # open the TUI (default)
money import                 # extract new transactions from every statement
money import --force         # re-parse statements even if unchanged
money retag                  # re-apply rules.toml: retag, and re-pair transfers
money ls --untagged          # what neither a rule nor a transfer has claimed
money ls --untagged --uniq   # the same, one row per distinct description
money ls --wide              # also show type and reported balance
money ls --account checking --month 2026-01
money report --month 2026-01 # spending by tag
money accounts               # balances
money parsers                # available statement parsers
money config                 # which data root is in use, and why

An account folder appears in the app only once its statements have been imported — creating an account.toml is not enough on its own. Run money import (or press i in the TUI) after adding one.

--uniq turns ls into a list of patterns still to write rather than a list of rows to read: one line per distinct account and description, since fifty visits to the same shop are one glob, not fifty lines. Descriptions print exactly as a glob sees them — upper-cased with whitespace collapsed — so two statements that worded the same payee differently collapse into the one row they deserve, and a pattern written from the list matches what the list showed you.

$ money ls --untagged --uniq
ACCOUNT   DESCRIPTION
checking  KAUFLAND 4412 SOFIA
checking  LIDL SOFIA 4412
savings   INTEREST PAID

3 distinct descriptions

It composes with the other filters (--account, --month, --search), and --limit caps the rows printed, saying how many it held back. It cannot be combined with --wide: a reported balance belongs to one transaction, and there is nothing sensible to print for a whole group of them.

TUI keys

Key	Action
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 / tab	accounts · transactions · report · rule builder · rules · transfer builder · transfers
enter	open the selected account (accounts view)
/	filter by description
u	show only untagged transactions (matched transfer legs are not among them)
a	clear the account filter
i	import · r re-apply rules · q quit

There is no key that tags a transaction. Tags come from rules.toml and nowhere else, so tagging what you are looking at means writing a rule for it on 4 — which is why that screen shows you what a glob catches before you save.

Rule builder (4)

Writing rules by hand means guessing what a glob will catch. This screen shows the answer as you type: the form is on the left, and on the right the still-untagged descriptions the glob currently matches, marked ▸, grouped and sorted alphabetically, under a running "n of m descriptions match" count.

The list narrows as you type, so what is on screen is what the rule would claim — nothing else is left there to read past. The count keeps the context the rows no longer can: m is everything still in view, so 2 of 7 says the glob picked two descriptions out of seven, and 0 of 7 says the glob is wrong. With the glob still empty there is nothing to filter by, and the list is every untagged description in the data — which is the other question this screen answers, and where you go looking for the next thing to write a rule for.

  glob                            Untagged description              N
╭────────────────────────────╮   ▸  LIDL SOFIA 4412                 2
│ *LIDL*                     │   ▸  LIDL VARNA 9911                 1
╰────────────────────────────╯
  vs. the description

  account
╭────────────────────────────╮
│ blank = every account      │
╰────────────────────────────╯
  blank = all accounts

▸ tag
╭────────────────────────────╮
│ groceries                  │
╰────────────────────────────╯
  tab completes · ctrl+n: 1 more

  note
╭────────────────────────────╮
│ optional                   │
╰────────────────────────────╯
  why this rule exists

  2 of 7 descriptions match

Only gro was typed in the tag field; ceries is the ghosted completion.

tab / ↑↓ move between the glob, account, tag and note fields, pgup / pgdn scroll the list, and enter appends the rule to rules.toml and retags immediately, so the rows it caught disappear from the list. esc goes back. On a short window the form gives up its spacing and then its hints, so all four fields stay on screen.

The account and tag fields complete as you type: the rest of the match is ghosted in grey after the cursor, and tab (or → at the end of the line) takes it. When several candidates share the prefix, the hint under the box says how many, and ctrl+n / ctrl+p cycle through them. Nothing is committed until you accept it, so a new tag is still just typed out in full. Accounts come from the folders on disk and the index; tags from every tag in use plus any named in rules.toml, so a tag is completable from the moment a rule mentions it — which is what stops groceries acquiring a grocery twin.

Leaving the account blank applies the rule everywhere; filling it in also narrows the preview to that account. Rules are appended, so anything already in rules.toml keeps precedence — the preview accounts for that automatically, since it only ever lists transactions no existing rule has already tagged. Legs of a matched transfer are left out too: they are already accounted for by the definition that paired them, and the report leaves them out anyway.

Rules (5)

Every rule in file order, with the number of transactions it actually claims. Rules that claim none are marked ✗.

money · rules · 5 rules · 2 match nothing

#      Pattern                Account     Tag         Txns  Note
1      *LIDL*                 (all)       groceries    3     the weekly shop
2   ✗  *LIDL SOFIA*           (all)       shadowed     0
3   ✗  *OLD BANK NAME*        (all)       dead         0     closed in 2025
4      *ZARA*                 (all)       clothes      1
5      *КАУФЛАНД*             checking    groceries    1     4412 is the branch

The count is how many transactions the rule wins, not how many its glob could match. Rule 2 above matches LIDL SOFIA 4412 perfectly well, but rule 1 claims it first, so rule 2 is dead weight — which is the point of the screen. A rule can therefore reach zero either by matching nothing or by being shadowed, and both are worth deleting.

d deletes the selected rule, p deletes every rule marked ✗ at once, and both ask for a y first. r recounts against what is currently in the index, which is what you want after an import has added rows; rules.toml itself is read at startup and whenever you save a rule from the builder, so an edit made in another window needs a restart. Deleting edits rules.toml textually, so your comments, ordering and formatting survive; a comment sitting directly above a deleted rule goes with it, while one separated by a blank line is treated as a section heading and left alone.

Transfer builder (6)

Same idea as the rule builder, for money moved between your own accounts. Both sides are named, and the preview on the right shows what the pair would be: ▸ for a movement it matches end to end, ⚠ for a leg it catches on one side and cannot pair with anything on the other.

  from account                     Date        Amount   Movement            Description
╭────────────────────────────╮  ⚠  2026-04-01   500.00  checking → ?        TRANSFER TO SAVINGS
│ checking                   │  ▸  2026-03-01   500.00  checking → savings  TRANSFER TO SAVINGS
╰────────────────────────────╯
  money leaves here

▸ from desc
╭────────────────────────────╮
│ *TO SAVINGS*               │
╰────────────────────────────╯
  glob vs. the leaving leg

  to account
╭────────────────────────────╮
│ savings                    │
╰────────────────────────────╯
  money arrives here

  to desc
╭────────────────────────────╮
│ *FROM CHECKING*            │
╰────────────────────────────╯
  glob vs. the arriving leg

  tolerance %
╭────────────────────────────╮
│ 0                          │
╰────────────────────────────╯
  0 = amounts must match exactly

  note
╭────────────────────────────╮
│ optional                   │
╰────────────────────────────╯
  why this transfer exists

  1 pairs · 1 unpaired

The account fields complete exactly as the rule builder's do. tab / ↑↓ move between fields, pgup / pgdn scroll the list, enter appends the definition to rules.toml and re-pairs immediately, and esc goes back. Saving keeps both account names in place and clears the two globs, since the next transfer you write is usually the same route in the other direction. The tolerance is cleared with them: carried over silently it would loosen a route that never asked for one. Six fields need more room than the rule builder's four, so on a short window this form gives up its spacing, then its hints, then the borders on the fields you are not editing — every field stays on screen.

tolerance % is the one field worth previewing before you save. Type a percentage and the pairs it buys appear immediately, showing both amounts — 500.00 → 495.00 — with what they cost summarised beside the counts:

  1 pairs · 0 unpaired · 5.00 in fees

A half-written definition previews too: fill in one side and its legs show up as unpaired, which is the quickest way to see that a glob is wrong before you have written the other half.

Transfers (7)

Every definition in file order, with what it currently pairs.

money · transfers · 4 definitions · 1 leg(s) unpaired

#      From                       To                        Pairs  Unpaired  Tol    Note
1   ⚠  checking *TO SAVINGS*      savings *FROM CHECKING*    11     1                monthly saving
2      checking *TO BROKER*       traderepublic *FROM NLB*    4     0
3      checking *WIRE TO SAVINGS* savings *WIRE FROM CHECK*   2     0        1.5%   the bank keeps a fee
4   ✗  checking *TO OLD BANK*     savings *FROM OLD BANK*     0     0               closed in 2025

The two counts mean different things, which is the point of the screen. ⚠ is a definition catching legs it cannot complete: a wrong glob on the other side, a statement not imported yet, or a movement that genuinely went missing. ✗ is a definition matching nothing at all, which is just dead weight.

Tol is the definition's tolerance_pct, and it qualifies the counts beside it: row 3's two pairs were matched on slack rather than on the amount agreeing. It is blank for every definition that requires the exact amount — which is the default, so an empty column means nothing here is pairing on a mismatch.

d deletes the selected definition and p deletes every ✗ one at once, both after a y. Definitions marked ⚠ are never pruned — they are doing something, just not finishing it, and deleting one would hide the problem rather than fix it. r re-pairs against what is currently in the index.

rules.toml

Rules are evaluated in file order and the first match wins, so put specific rules above general ones. Patterns are globs (* and ?) matched case-insensitively, with whitespace collapsed.

A rule matches on match (the description) and type (the bank's own classification). Setting both is an "and": both must match.

note is free text for you, never for the matcher: why the rule is there, or what the unrecognisable payee behind the glob actually is. It shows in the last column of the rules screen. Ordinary # comments still work and are preserved on delete; a note differs in that it survives a round trip through the tool, so the rule builder can write one and the rules screen can show it.

[[rule]]
tag   = "groceries"
match = "*LIDL*"

[[rule]]
tag   = "salary"
match = "*ACME PAYROLL*"
note  = "paid on the 4th; the December one lands early"

# A rule can be limited to one account, and can require several patterns.
[[rule]]
account = "checking"
tag     = "rent"
match   = "*STANDING ORDER 4471*"

[[rule]]
type  = "CARD_PAYMENT"
match = "*LIDL*"
tag   = "groceries"

Every tag comes from this file, so a tag is never something you have to keep safe: money retag recomputes all of them from the current rules and is safe to run whenever you change it. A transaction no rule matches simply stays untagged, and shows up under money ls --untagged, the u view, and (untagged) in the report — unless it is one leg of a matched transfer, which is already spoken for and is left out of all three.

Transfers

Money moved between your own accounts is one movement the statements show twice: an outflow leaving one account and an inflow arriving in another. A [[transfer]] block names both legs, in the same file and with the same globs as everything else.

[[transfer]]
from_account = "checking"
from_desc    = "*TO SAVINGS*"
to_account   = "savings"
to_desc      = "*FROM CHECKING*"
note         = "monthly saving, usually lands the next working day"

# Such movements are often only identifiable by the other side's account
# number, whatever the rest of the description happens to say. Every bank
# parser keeps that number in the description, so an ordinary glob finds it.
[[transfer]]
from_account = "checking"
from_desc    = "*SI56*"
to_account   = "traderepublic"
to_desc      = "*FROM NLB*"

All four _account / _desc keys are required; note and tolerance_pct are optional, and note, as on a rule, never takes part in matching. from_desc is matched against outflows on from_account and to_desc against inflows on to_account, so a definition written backwards pairs nothing.

Two legs are the same movement when they match one definition and are dated no more than 5 days apart. Within one currency they must also be the exact opposite amount, because a movement that arrives short is not obviously the same movement leaving.

When the bank takes a fee

Some routes charge, and then the two statements really do disagree: 500.00 leaves and 495.00 arrives. tolerance_pct says how far short (or over) the arriving leg may be, as a percentage of the leg that left:

[[transfer]]
from_account  = "checking"
from_desc     = "*WIRE TO SAVINGS*"
to_account    = "savings"
to_desc       = "*WIRE FROM CHECKING*"
tolerance_pct = 1.5
note          = "the bank keeps a wire fee"

It belongs to that one definition and loosens nothing else — every other route still needs the exact amount. It defaults to 0, which is what every definition written without the key means, and it must stay under 100: at 100% any amount would pair with any other and the dates would be deciding alone. Keep it as tight as the fee actually requires. Every percent of slack is also a percent more chance of pairing two unrelated movements that happen to fall in the same five days, and where two candidates are the same number of days away the nearer amount wins.

The difference is not forgiven, it is reported. A pair leaves the report entirely, so a fee hidden inside one would be spending that appears nowhere at all. money report names it on the excluded line and the TUI's report gives it its own row (see below). Across currencies there is no fee to compute — the two numbers are in different units — so a tolerance there means nothing and is ignored.

Across currencies the amount is not checked at all. An exchange between two of your own accounts — the same money in EUR and in BGN — has two unrelated numbers, and the tool holds no exchange rates, so the dates carry the pairing on their own and the nearest one wins. That is a weaker rule than the same-currency one, deliberately: use the same route twice inside one window and it will pair the wrong two legs. The transfer builder shows both amounts for such a pair (500.00 → 977.90), which is the only place the rate the bank actually used appears.

Definitions are evaluated in file order and each transaction belongs to at most one transfer, so — exactly as with rules — the first definition to claim a leg keeps it.

A matched pair leaves the report entirely. Both legs go together, so a report over everything is unchanged in total by money you shuffled between your own accounts, and money report says what it held out, per currency and per direction — an exchange puts its two legs in different currencies, so each side reports only the leg it saw:

transfers excluded: 4 legs in EUR, 2000.00 out, 1500.00 in
transfers excluded: 1 legs in BGN, 0.00 out, 977.90 in

Where a tolerance_pct definition let a fee through, the line says so too, and that is the number your spending is short by:

transfers excluded: 2 legs in EUR, 500.00 out, 495.00 in, 5.00 in fees

The report screen (3) shows the same thing under its TOTAL, the fee on its own row:

TAG          CUR  OUT     IN      NET      N
groceries    EUR   20.00    0.00   -20.00  1
TOTAL        EUR   20.00    0.00   -20.00
(transfers)  EUR  500.00  495.00    -5.00  2
  ⤷ fees     EUR    5.00            -5.00  1

The fee is counted only for pairs whose legs are both in the report you are looking at, for the same reason the line counts legs and not transfers: filter to one account or one month and you usually have one side of a movement, and half a pair cannot say what the other half received.

A paired leg shows as (transfer) in the tag column of the transaction list and of money ls, so it reads as accounted for rather than as a blank waiting for a rule. That label is display only — nothing writes it to the index, and it is never offered as a tag to complete against. A rule tag wins where there is one, since that is your own word for it.

An unpaired leg is not a transfer and still counts, tagged like anything else. That is deliberate: money that left an account and cannot be shown to have arrived is exactly what you want to see, not something to quietly drop. money import and money retag report unpaired legs on stderr, and the transfers screen (7) shows which definition they belong to.

The pairing is derived state, like the tags: it lives in the index, is recomputed wholesale by money retag and after every import, and disappears with the definition that made it.

account.toml

Every account folder needs one. currency and parser are required.

name     = "Main Checking"
currency = "EUR"
parser   = "nlb"
# minor_digits = 2       # decimal places for this currency
# include = ["*.csv"]    # only treat matching files as statements

Parsers

Three are built in, ported from the original Python extractors. A statement layout is described in Go rather than in a table of column indexes, so there is nothing else to configure — parser names one of these and that is all.

parser	Statement	Notes
nlb	NLB izpisek PDF	Wrapped descriptions are folded in from continuation lines, and the IBAN column is appended to the description.
traderepublic	Trade Republic PDF	Handles both the single-line and the stacked layout by measuring column positions.
revolut	account-statement*.csv	Skips non-COMPLETED rows, folds the fee into the amount.

name     = "Trade Republic"
currency = "EUR"
parser   = "traderepublic"

The two PDF parsers shell out to pdftotext -layout (poppler-utils), exactly as the Python versions did; its layout reconstruction is what makes the column-based parsing work.

Amount parsing is shared and deliberately tolerant: 1.234,56, -45.20, 45,20-, (45.20) and 45.20 EUR all work, whichever parser reads them.

Revolut and multiple currencies. One export can hold several currencies, but an account here has exactly one. Rows in other currencies are skipped and reported at import. To keep them, give that currency its own account folder with its own currency and minor_digits (JPY wants minor_digits = 0) and put a copy or symlink of the export in it.

Adding a parser

A new bank means a new parser. Drop it in internal/parser and register it — no other package changes:

func init() {
	parser.Register("bankx", func(acc *config.Account) (parser.Parser, error) {
		return &bankXParser{digits: acc.Digits()}, nil
	})
}

func (p *bankXParser) Parse(path string, acc *config.Account) ([]parser.RawTxn, error) {
	// ... return date (YYYY-MM-DD), description, and signed minor units
}

It becomes usable by setting parser = "bankx" in an account.toml. Use parser.ParseAmount for the decimal handling rather than rolling your own.

Balance checks

Statements that report a running balance are verified on import: each balance must equal the previous one plus the transaction amount, the same check all three original scripts made. A break means a row was missed or misparsed, and is reported as a warning without stopping the import.

Deduplication

Each transaction gets a fingerprint from its date, amount, normalised description, and its ordinal among identical lines in the same statement. So two identical purchases on one day are both kept, while re-importing an overlapping statement adds nothing. Unchanged files are skipped by checksum before parsing.

Development

go build ./... && go test ./...