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Actual Budget

Connects Decree to your Actual Budget server, enabling automated transaction imports from bank alert emails. Once configured, the actual-budget and actual-budget-parse routines are enabled automatically and credentials are loaded by the container at runtime.

New to Actual Budget? Start with the service setup first.

Prerequisites​

Your Actual Budget server must be running and reachable from the Decree container. If you're using the full Existential stack, it's at http://actual-budget:5006.

Setup​

./existential.sh run actual-budget setup

The script will:

  1. Prompt for your server URL and password
  2. Connect and list available budgets
  3. Let you select a budget and optionally enter its encryption password
  4. Verify credentials by downloading the budget
  5. Display all accounts with their IDs
  6. Save credentials to automation/secrets/actual-budget/credentials.env
  7. Save the account list to automation/secrets/actual-budget/accounts.json
  8. Enable the actual-budget and actual-budget-parse routines in services/automation/decree/config.yml

Account IDs​

After setup, account IDs are printed to the terminal and saved to accounts.json. You'll need an account ID when configuring any automation that imports transactions — it tells Decree which account to post to.

If you add accounts later, re-run ./existential.sh run actual-budget setup to refresh credentials and the account list.

Next Steps​

Set up automated transaction imports from bank alert emails: Bank Alert → Gmail → Actual Budget