Automate Your Life: Banking

I have been encouraging my team to automate everything.

To live by this principle I have started to automate my bank spreadsheet. I keep a spreadsheet with all of my banking transactions. This comes in handy should I need to investigate an old transaction. My current sheet covers the last 9 years. I had been manually copying the details over.

My bank allows statements to be exported as CSV files.

Here is a simple bash script that allows the data to be put into the format that I want:

cat filename.csv | awk -F, ‘{print $1 “,” $5 “,” $7 “,” $6 }’ | sed ‘1d’ | tail -r

I like the newest transactions at the bottom and credits before debits.

This becomes much easier to import into a google sheet rather than fighting with open office.

I have multiple current accounts and rebalance the main current account to a fixed amount at the end of each month. The remainder is moved into an offset mortgage. Credit card bills get paid (when due) from the mortgage account. This maximised the offset benefit.