Bank of America CSV to Beancount
Convert a Bank of America checking or savings CSV into balanced double-entry Beancount transactions, with the summary preamble handled.
Column mapping verified against a real Bank of America export
How to export your Bank of America transactions
- 1
Sign in at bankofamerica.com and open the account you want to export.
- 2
Select Download, then choose a date range.
- 3
Pick “Microsoft Excel format (CSV)” — not QuickBooks or Quicken, which produce files this converter does not read.
- 4
Open the file in a text editor. Delete everything above the line beginning “Date,Description,Amount” — that block is an account summary, not transactions.
- 5
Copy what remains, starting at that header line, and paste it below.
The file starts with a summary block you have to delete
Bank of America's checking export opens with several lines of account summary — description, beginning balance, total credits and debits — before the real header row. Those lines are not transactions and will confuse any importer, including this one. Delete everything above the row that begins “Date,Description,Amount”, then paste. Savings exports have the same preamble; credit-card exports generally do not.
Beancount output
Bank of America export questions
Why does my first transaction look wrong?
Almost always the summary preamble was left in, so the beginning-balance line was read as a transaction. Delete everything above the “Date,Description,Amount” header and convert again.
What is the Running Bal. column for?
It is the account balance after each transaction. The converter ignores it — Beancount derives balances from the postings themselves, and a stored balance that disagrees would be a bug rather than a fact. You can use it to write balance assertions later.
How far back can I export?
Bank of America generally exposes about 18 months of activity for download. For older periods you will need the PDF statements; the converter only ever sees what is in the CSV you paste.
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