Betterment-ofx
Purpose
This tool attempts to translate a Betterment statement PDF into an OFX file, suitable for import into Quicken (and perhaps other tools as well.)
The reason this works from the statement PDF is that the CSV that's available from Betterment lacks any investment data, it's strictly cash transactions. This attempts to report all activity.
While every attempt has been made to make this parsing robust, it's still likely to be fragile for unexpected data, for account types I have no examples of, or for PDF format changes. PDF is really painful to work from.
I also attempted to keep this straight Python, but ultimately had to give up on the various python PDF parsing libraries. All failed in some respect; most often because all the text jumbled together and structure was lost. (This is more a limitation of PDF than the libraries' fault.) The java-based pdfbox was the only tool I found that extracted enough structure to work from.
I think I produce the right records for each item, but I am not a finance person and can't swear to it.
Quirks and oddities
I found that there are some quirks in how Betterment does things and in their reports that make this an imperfect translation.
Rounding errors
Betterment reports show shares and price to 3 decimal places. Quicken adjusts the price to make the share count correct. However, this results in occasional rounding errors that result in 0.0001 share adjustment records.
It's possible that the price is more accurate, and I could adjust the share count instead to avoid this. But I have not experimented to see if this produces a better result.
Sweep Accounts
They have a single sweep account shared across all taxable accounts, and another shared across all IRAs. OFX seems to expect a distinct sweep account per trading account. So it's not clear how to map this correctly.
Currently, I mostly ignore the sweep account, just rolling the relevant transactions into the records for the investing account, but this means that if you have more than one account tied to the sweep account, the balance is hard to reconcile.
I have thought about creating a "virtual" account for each sweep account, and showing transfers to and from it. This would most closely match what Betterment actually does, except for fabricating an account number for this made-up account.
End-of-quarter
Dividends that pay out in the last few days of the quarter show up as cash transactions, but the corresponding security transaction does not appear. Most (perhaps all?) of the time, the security transaction shows up the next quarter, even though they are dated before that quarter starts.
For dividends that occur during most of the quarter, I ignore the cash transaction and only report the security transaction. Otherwise it creates duplicate records. But at the end of the quarter, I don't have the security record.
Reporting only the cash transaction doesn't show which security it came from. If I ignore the cash transaction, the cash balance is wrong. If I report it, then next quarter when the security record comes in, it becomes a duplicate record. If I ignore that, then you can never tell which security gave the dividend.
For now, I've elected to report the cash transaction at the end of the quarter, and also the security transaction at the beginning of the next quarter. That leaves a clean-up task for the user to go delete the less-useful cash records once the more-useful security records come in. At least it's easier than typing it all from scratch.
End-of-year
I notice that there is a similar situation where I had some cash records on Dec 31. However, the corresponding security transaction was never reported, not on the "correct" quarter, and not on the next quarter / next calendar year either. Those records are just omitted completely. This makes it hard to reconcile things perfectly, especially if the sweep account is shared between accounts. But it's still better than leaving Betterment completely untracked in your financial software, I suppose.
Requirements
Download pdfbox from here: https://pdfbox.apache.org/
The code expects pdfbox-app-2.0.19.jar, in the current directory when you run statement_parse.py, and doesn't currently make any effort to check for other versions.
You'll also need python 3.7+
Running
I prefer to use a python virtual env to run this code.
pyvenv .venv
pip install -r requirements.txt
./statement_parse.py statement.pdf > statement.ofx
You should be able to import this ofx into your financial software.
Reporting issues
It's fairly likely at this point you may run into issues importing your statements, since up to now I'm only able to test against examples I have from my own account. It's fairly unlikely that I can resolve these issues unless you are willing to provide a sample PDF along with your bug report.
A note to Betterment
Please add native OFX output. Use this code as a starting place if you like. You don't have to pay Intuit for an OFX license, it's an open standard. But Quicken can import OFX, and so can lots of other stuff.
If I can do it, so can you - it'll be a lot easier working directly from raw data instead of parsing junk out of a PDF like this.
Overall I rather like Betterment, but frankly this omitted feature seems kind of embarrassing. And so do some of the reporting quirks.
References
This reference was invaluable in producing valid OFX: https://schemas.liquid-technologies.com/OFX/2.1.1/?page=seclistmsgsrsv11.html