Integration with Actual Budget

[latetedemelon]

Support guidelines

• My request extends the functionality of Ocular in a meaningful way.
• I've used the search and this has not been requested before.

Description

Essentially I was hoping that ocular could set monthly budgets in actual budget. Ocular is a great forecasting tool, Actual Budget is a great tracking tool this would allow them to work together.

Solution

I think aligning the categories might be a little tricky. Essentially we'd have to pull the missing categories into Ocular. Then we'd need to push the monthly updates and create any categories that don't exist prior to updating the budget in Actual Budget.

Ideally we'd be able to select the number of months to syncronize, and have the option to overwrite existing values or not.

What are alternatives?

New Integration.

Additional context

No response

[simonwep]

Woah, that'd be a major feature. I'll need some time to think about this, not even sure if this would't be out of scope for this project - but I get the Idea and it'd make sense to have some kind of sync layer. This would probably be a whole new service running as part of ocular-docker ^^

[zenminimalist]

I would very much like this as well.

However, I would be more than happy if I could just take the Actual Budget export, which is a sqlite db, and maybe once every few months import it into Oocular and do some mid to long-planning.

For fun, I converted the Actual sqlite.db (export) and out came a bunch of csv files. 😀

I think Oocular wouldn't even have to import the sqlite db or do any kind of conversion, but import a more manageable format that the user provides and converts. That way, it would not mean developing the whole kitchen sink - and is a compromise to make the project manageable and provide tons of value.

Personally, I think you're on to something about the forecasting and visualizing thing.

[simonwep]

Hm, I'm definitely down for an additional import tool on the frontend as that should be easy to develop, but I'd have to take a look into Actual Budget first to see how users can export data there and how the data-structure looks like :)

[zenminimalist]

I'd have to take a look into Actual Budget first to see how users can export data there and how the data-structure looks like :)

Best is to just download the demo database from the official Actual website here. You'll get the same sqlite database that I converted into CSV files via online converter.

Also, I believe if you focus on providing beautiful chart to visual data from various apps (long term) users will flock to your app. You might want to get into touch with Pikapods to get your app hosted their, as the owner does provide profit sharing with the open-source projects there where possible.

[latetedemelon]

You might just want to use the Nodejs API that' s built into Actual Budget. Alternatively there is a repo that provides a Rest interface. https://github.com/jhonderson/actual-http-api

[simonwep]

@latetedemelon as @zenminimalist already mentioned, I'd probably be an import/export "integration" instead of a full-blown one where it fetches data from actual budget as the API is meant to be application independent (because I don't have enough time to develop an API just for ocular). Not sure when I'll get to have a look at it but I'll see to at least make something work with it :)