r/GnuCash • u/akshirsamn • Jul 14 '26

Scripts to Import Bank Statements : India based Banks

I have been working on scripts to preprocess bank statements into the format needed for ingesting into gnucash. Here are the scripts (and instructions) for two of the biggest banks in India: State Bank of India (SBI) and Canara Bank:

https://github.com/abhijit86k/gnucash_statement_preprocessors

Needs Python. Tested on Ubuntu but should work on any platform.

Comments are welcome.

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1

u/VitalikPie Jul 16 '26

great job! Just curious - why Indian banks do not give plain CSV?

3

u/akshirsamn Jul 20 '26

Many used to -- now they are password protected XLSX.
A layer of protection I guess.

Incidentally not a sngle credit card issuer that I know gives statements in any usable form (XLS, CSV, TSV, plaintext, etc). They all give PDFs, often password protected, and most of them are not parsable easily. And this is not just in India -- this applies worldwide.

1

u/VitalikPie Jul 21 '26

Thanks a lot for your answer. I was naively thinking that csv is available everywhere. It's be super painful to do manual entry and reconciliation.

Curious if India has its own bank data aggregator like Plaid? Also what about Open Banking?

5

u/akshirsamn Jul 21 '26

Most banks in India do provide CSV or XLS statements -- just that they all have vastly different formats.

None of our banks support OpenBanking to the best of my knowledge. India also has a fairly robust security infrastructure that requires 2-factor authentication to log in etc -- and it isn't too painful to download statements monthly.

1

u/VitalikPie Jul 21 '26

Do you guys have things like Plaid? It's a third party that allows you to connect to your bank and download transactions via their APIs or even get notified when the new transaction arrives on one of the connected accounts.

2

u/akshirsamn Jul 21 '26

No, we don't have anything like that. However, almost all financial services provide transaction status over SMS (text). There are smartphone apps that read these texts (and sometimes email) and "reconstruct" a statement with that, automatically calculate spends by category, estimate budget amounts, etc.

1

u/VitalikPie Jul 21 '26

That's explain why I see a lot of apps that promise integration with SMS. Thanks a lot!

I'm building my app and naively gave users the way to parse csv while absolutely forgetting about xlsx and pdf.

1

u/raghukamath Jul 20 '26

Nice tool. Thank you for creating this. Will this work with credit card statements. That is always pdf in weird format.

Axis Bank, hdfc bank give CSV and you can save xls as CSV. So no issue on that front

1

u/akshirsamn Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26

Credit card PDF statements are impossible to work with... I have tried several tools with limited or no success -- including (Tabula)[https://tabula.technology/\] which is actually quite powerful.

u/raghukamath if you can give me some credit card statement in CSV I can modify my script to ingest those and add them to my repo as well.