Unable to extract transactions from gocardless

[jstammers]

Hello,
I came across this repo when trying to look for a unified way to pull transactions from various bank accounts into my beancount ledger and was very impressed by this. It looks like it will save me a lot of work!

Initially, I encountered some errors when trying to extract from gocardless using the nordigen Importer.
I first had to modify the base url to "https://bankaccountdata.gocardless.com/".

beancounttools/src/tariochbctools/importers/nordigen/importer.py

Line 31 in fae22cb

"https://ob.nordigen.com/api/v2/token/new/",

beancounttools/src/tariochbctools/importers/nordigen/importer.py

Line 50 in fae22cb

f"https://ob.nordigen.com/api/v2/accounts/{accountId}/transactions/",

After that, I was able to authenticate and pull my transactions using the API successfully but encountered an issue with certain foreign transactions, e.g

        "currencyExchange": {
            "sourceCurrency": "GBP",
            "exchangeRate": "2.0487",
            "targetCurrency": "AUD"
        },

The importer expects this to contain an "instructedAmount" key, so I modified the following line to handle cases where this does not appear

beancounttools/src/tariochbctools/importers/nordigen/importer.py

Line 73 in fae22cb

if "currencyExchange" in trx:

        if "currencyExchange" in trx and "instructedAmount" in trx

Finally, I noticed when debugging this that I was hitting some rate limits - it seems like it's only possible to query this API 4 times per account per day. Normally, I don't expect this to be an issue but I wonder if it's worth e.g. storing the transaction JSON to disk with a timestamp and loading from there.

[tarioch]

Thanks for your report, I think you're also in the discussion on beancount/smart_importer#130 based on the outcome there I'll adjust things in this library or drop the functionality.

[john-frandsen]

Disclosure up front: I'm affiliated with open-banking.io, so please read this as one option rather than a neutral recommendation.

On the rate-limit part specifically — the "4 times per account per day" cap is GoCardless/Nordigen's own Bank-Account-Data policy, so there isn't much the importer can do beyond the on-disk JSON caching you're already describing (which is the right call). Your base-URL and instructedAmount fixes look correct regardless.

If the daily cap itself is the blocker, I maintain a beangulp importer that pulls the same PSD2 data through open-banking.io instead of Nordigen, without the per-account daily rate-limit wall, and it decrypts transactions client-side with no eIDAS certificate to obtain: https://github.com/open-banking-io/clients/tree/main/beancount (pip install beancount-openbanking-io). Sharing only in case the rate limit is the real pain here.