Actual Budget Helper Scripts

This is a collection of useful scripts to help you manage your Actual Budget.

• Requirements
• Configuration
• Installation
• Scripts:
  • Loan Interest Calculator

Requirements

• Actual Budget
• Node.js (21.6.2+)
  • @actual-app/api
  • dotenv
  • jsdom

Configuration

Create a .env file in the root directory with the following content:

ACTUAL_SERVER_URL="https://<Actual Budget server URL>"
ACTUAL_SERVER_PASSWORD="<Actual Budget server password>"
ACTUAL_SYNC_ID="<Actual Budget sync ID>"

# optional, for encrypted files
ACTUAL_FILE_PASSWORD="<file password>"

# optional, if you want to use a different cache directory
ACTUAL_CACHE_DIR="./cache"

# optional, name of the payee for added interest transactions
IMPORTER_INTEREST_PAYEE_NAME="Loan Interest"

Installation

Run npm install to install any required dependencies.

Scripts

Loan Interest Calculator

This script calculates the interest for a loan account and adds the interest transactions to Actual Budget.

For each account that you want to automaitcally calculate interest for, you need to edit the account notes and add the following tags:

• interestRate:0.0X sets the interest rate to X percent (note: be sure to enter the rate as a decimal and not a percentage)
• interestDay:XX sets the day of the month that the interest is calculated

As an example, if your loan is at 4.5% interest and you want to insert an interest transaction on the 28th of the month, set the account note to interestRate:0.045 interestDay:28.

You can optionally change the payee used for the interest transactions by setting IMPORTER_INTEREST_PAYEE_NAME in the .env file.

To run:

$ node apply-interest.js

It is recommended to run this script once per month.