Archiving paperless online bank statements

mr-b

Hi

I've just encountered a nasty surprise with Egg Card's online statements. Every few months I had been periodically saving a bunch of statements as a web page archive files (.mht) using IE (since Egg's Money Manager doesn't support Firefox) and I have discovered that most of my statements are of the same month (the first one of the session)! :mad:

I did some testing and it appears that if you use IE's Page > Save as > "Web archive single file (.mht)" or "Webpage complete (html)" that only the first page of that session is saved, even though the browser is displaying the correct month! Has anyone else seen this before?
I found that the 'safe' option is to just save the html, although the resultant page loses a lot of the readability.

The other issue is that you have to use this method at all, rather than downloading the statement in a common spreadsheet format. I also use First Direct which supports downloads, but unfortunately does not have a batch mode, so you have to display the statement, choose download, select type of format, type filename etc. for every single month. I'm sure someone will pipe up now and say print them out, but that rather misses the whole point of paperless banking!

The final issue is that banks seem to vary in how long they keep statements online. For some it's just one year (Egg), which I think makes it even more necessary to download all the statements.

So in all, it seems to me that although some banks are heavily pushing paperless banking they are not doing their bit to make archiving easy for consumers.

Does anyone know any banks which do the following?

- allow batch downloads using useful filenames e.g. bank - acc# - year - month
- keep statements online for several years
- show a clear warning about how long the retention period is
- allow searching of statements

jamesd

NatWest. Six years with searching. Not batch downloads but sensible automatic names for one by one downloading.

boliston

I would generally try and save as a pdf if possible, or "print" the webpage to a pdf file.

I don't think archiving as an html file is so good, as an html page normally consists of other files, images, stylesheets etc.

As text only pdf files only take up a few kb disc space it seems very mean that some banks only save a few months worth of statements.

Icesaver

Halifax keep them archinved for 2 years ,allow downloading straight into MS Money or as a CSV file, which you can later re-name.

mr-b

I think printing to a PDF file is prolly the best sol'n here (there seem to be quite a few free PDF printer utils around), and most indexing apps can read them for searching.

Egg's response was very disappointing for a co. that used to be quite progressive and good for cust service - they just recommended printing them off or using copy and paste into a Word doc. Hardly very 21st century! Oh and they only display them for a year, you have to cough up £2 each for past ones on paper.