Getting old transfers from A&L

AnonymousForObviousReason

Introduction
Like many out there, I'm moving from A&L and I wanted to update my finance manager software with my transactions but I'd let it slip when I started my new job a few years ago and so resigned myself to a dull Saturday. Only to find out that they only offer going back 9 months. My fault I know but still, why not let me go back further, can’t they store that information?

Then I thought ... I'm a mad, cool, !ber, coder - well I have a computer, I'm a bit fat and if I didn't wash my hair tomorrow it'll start to look a bit greasy so that should be enough.

Guide
This guide is for intermediate users on how to get statements older than 9 months from their A&L account. If you are happy to install an alternative browser (Opera) and know what html is, you should be fine. If you’re not sure then I recommend you don’t go on, not because you can break anything or you’re not an intelligent person who could work it out but for the simple reason that this is something to do with your bank account and you don’t know who I am – any doubt about something from an email or the internet just walk away.

This is a fairly simple technique, it doesn’t involve any 3rd party sites and is a little obvious once you think about it. To complete this you need to install Opera (no link provided because you should have a level of knowledge to find it yourself, if you’re not sure how stop and walk away and don’t follow guides about how to do stuff with your internet bank account – yes this has been stated before but you obviously didn’t listen).

Now Opera is installed (and you now have the best browser IMHO), navigate to A&L site and login. Select the account you want to get your transaction history from. You should see the current months history.

Right Mouse Click (RMC) on the white background and pick “Source”. Alternatively Ctrl+U or else menu (the big red O thing top left), page, developer tools, source.

Now find (ctrl+F) the string “cboMonth” – without quotes, it’s about 1/3 way down the page.

Locate the text:
<option value="" label="Choose month" selected="selected">Choose month</option>

Underneath this you can see all the months available you can normally view your transactions in the format of:

<option value="82010" >August 2010</option>

The bit that’s important is the option value in the quotes, this sets the month and year to be loaded, in this case 82010 is August 2010, this number is what selects the month and year to be displayed, if it’s October 2008 then it’s 102008. All we need to do is add the months we want. Adding the below line at the bottom of the list before the </select> tag.

<option value="122009" >December 2009</option>

Now hit the big button at the top saying Apply Changes, then go back to the webpage tab (keep source tab open we’ll be back here shortly after we proved it works). Click the dropdown list and you’ll see the new month we added. Select the new month and hit the Go button. Now smile to yourself in the sneakiest way you can, shifty eyes also helps you feel a little smug J

Back to work let’s make this more useful. Hit the back button and you’re back displaying this months transactions but with the altered dropdown list. Go to the source tab (if you closed it just repeat above steps) and now add the following lines beneath the previous one we added.

<option value="112009" >November 2009</option>
<option value="102009" >October 2009</option>
<option value="92009" >September 2009</option>
<option value="82009" >August 2009</option>
<option value="72009" >July 2009</option>
<option value="62009" >June 2009</option>
<option value="52009" >May 2009</option>
<option value="42009" >April 2009</option>
<option value="32009" >March 2009</option>
<option value="22009" >February 2009</option>
<option value="12009" >January 2009</option>

You can add more using the same format. I guess there is no limit as all stored in the same database unless they archive lots off, or your account goes back to before computing was used.

Anyway hit that Apply Changes button. Now you can see all the new months. Just select the month you want and hit Go, to reload the list hit the back button (the dropdown list keeps resetting itself after the Go click refreshes the page, but shouldn’t be that much of a problem).


Storing in a Finance Manager
It is tedious repeating these changes if you need to constantly refer back to your old statements, and who knows if banks will stop this in future. You can get around this by getting a financial package, Microsoft Money and Quicken are popular but you need to pay for them and they’re not supported anymore. If you don’t have a finance package I recommend ww.GNUCash.org it’s multi OS and open source – not simple but a basic knowledge of accounts or some research should get you through.

The next step is how to quickly download your statements.

1. Select the month you want and hit go to load its transactions
2. Scroll to bottom of screen and RMC on the download button and select open in new tab (alternatively hold shift and click with Left Mouse Button)
3. On the screen select the appropriate File format (for gnuCash use Quicken).
4. Type an appropriate filename, there will be a file for each month so I suggest a format like yymm
5. Click the download button again and you’ll be given the option to open it or save it. If you want to see what it looks like just use a text editor – if you don’t have one or don’t know what one is then how did you get this far? No really how?
6. Once saved go back to the previous tab showing the statements, hit the back button to reload your custom dates and pick a new month and hit Go. Now move to the already open download tab, change the name and hit download again, this will give you the newly loaded months transactions.
7. And repeat till you’re done.
8. Load into your finance package, actually to be honest you should test after the first month is downloaded else you could be doing this again.

Hope that helps, and remember you can use this download trick when just downloading the last 9 months of data on its own.

One Last Tip
Avoid changing your balance in the source tab to show multiple millions and telling your OH that you’ve won the lottery, all good for the first 30 seconds but the beating you take isn’t actually worth it. Also when you see your real account balance it’s even more depressing.

Edit: It's a little late but I may add better formatting and stuff later.