BankClassify - automatically classify your bank statement entries

Note: This is not 'finished' software. I use it for dealing with my bank statements, but it is not 'production-ready' and may crash or do strange things. It is also set up for my particular usage, so may not work for you. However, I hope it will be a useful resource.

This code will classify each entry in your bank statement into categories such as 'Supermarket', 'Petrol', 'Eating Out' etc. It learns from previously classified data, and corrections you make when it guesses a category incorrectly, and improves its performance over time.

How to use

1. Install the required libraries: pip install -r requirements.txt

2. Run the code in example.py as a demonstration. This will interactively classify the example bank statement data in Statement_Example.txt and save the results in AllData.csv. In the interactive classification you will be presented with a list of categories (with ID numbers), the details of a transaction, and a guessed category. You have three choices:

   • To accept the guessed category, just press Enter
   • To correct the classifier to a category that is in the list shown, enter the ID number of the category and press Enter
   • To add a new category, type the name of the category and press Enter

3. Examine the output in AllData.csv manually, or run bc._prep_for_analysis() and look at bc.in and bc.out for incomings and outgoings respectively. You will see there is a cat column with the category in it.

To use it with your own data:

• If you use Santander UK as your bank: just run bc.add_data(filename) with the filename of your downloaded statement file. Delete AllData.py first though, or the example data will be used as part of the training data.
• If you use another bank: Write your own function to read in your statement data from your bank. It must return a pandas dataframe with columns of date, desc and amount. Add this to the BankClassify class and call it instead of _read_santander_file.

Known issues

For Barclays bank sometimes the CSV file contains multiple commas within the 'memo' (transaction description) column. You can either manually patch your data before you run the tool or be aware that due to the work-around implemented we could potentially be losing valuable information beyond the comma.