Downloading bank transaction from a current account

sh856531

Hi all

Does anyone know of which current accounts currently allow you to download your bank transactions into some other software?

There is currently a well regarded system in the US called mint.com that can connect to a large number of american banks and automatically extract bank transactions. I think it can also connect to investment funds and show you your investment holdings. The idea being that you can download alot of information each month and perform analysis on it - i.e how much did I spend on fuel this month vs last month?

Does anyone know what the options for this in the UK are?

I'm currently with smile and they don't offer the ability to download at all - let alone perform an automatic import so it's far to time consuming to do anything with the information

Thanks in advance

S

callum9999

I don't know if it works with Smile or not, but First Direct's Internet Banking Plus does a similar thing. You don't need to be a customer of theirs to use it.

S0litaire

I'm with the RBS they allow me to download my statements in "MS Money" or CSV format going back a few years.

And most money management programs will do some sort of cost analysis on your data.
But you'll have to pull the data or put it in manually.

sh856531

callum9999 wrote: »

I don't know if it works with Smile or not, but First Direct's Internet Banking Plus does a similar thing. You don't need to be a customer of theirs to use it.

Hi callum

Thanks for the reply. When you say that I don't need to be a customer of there's - what exactly is it? Is it some sort of cost analysis software that they give away for free?

If I did have a First direct account - would it allow me to download data and use it in some generic system - like excel for example?

Thanks again

S

Linton

NatWest and Barclays support download of transaction details in various formats and I guess most or all of the other high street nanmks do so.. Many personal finance packages can read these downloads and perform the sort of analysis you want.

Milarky

Annoyingly with Lloyds you can't download your statements chronologically - but have to do it reverse-chronologically whilst actually specifying the date range chronologically. And if the results exceed 150 lines they don't even include the beginning of that search period anyway. Means you have to take successive reverse-listed chunks feed those into a spreadsheet, marry up the periods, add your own line count index and reverse sort against that!

By comparison Natwest/RBS are excellent for speed and ease (but limited to 12 months) without restriction. The drawback with them I find is the lack of 'realtime' balances and transaction info - one working day behind.

Meanwhile Nationwide (uses a 'mini statement' limited to 12 lines as well as 'full' statement a day in arrears - so can actually lose some transactions temporarily between the two) includes quite good (but not without flaws) 'search within' features and that all important 'chronological' feature which I'm sure Lloyds boffins are working on as we speak.