Anyone recommend the best Bank which offers good online transaction reporting, and CSV downloads.

palurie

Which is the best online transaction reporting offered by British Banks?
I am sick of Barclays... online statements are limited, especially regarding Transaction detail.
And if you download a CSV file, it only shows the amount of the transaction, and leaves off the current line-by-line balance.
I am ready to move from Barclays.

tripled

I've just tried the CSV export from Halifax and Starling, and both include a line by line balance. Both I find to be perfectly good, both have decent online and mobile banking, Halifax I would say would edge it because it's less faff on a laptop.

blue.peter

You might not want Santander. Out of curiuosity, I've just tried to download their data for my current account with them. That attempt was a failure.

I don't know if it's significant, but their CSV option is badged as Midata (csv), not just as CSV. Either way, it didn't work at all for me - it just denied that there were any transactions to download.

FWIW, the .xls download does work, and seems to be complete, with money in, money out and balances in separate columns. The balance is shown on every line. It's probably more faff than you want, but an .xls file could be converted to CSV.

Co-operative Bank's CSV download works well. However, their online banking is rather idiosyncratic. It might not be to your taste for other puroposes.

RG2015

I currently have, or previously had current accounts with the online banks listed at the end of this post.

NatWest, RBS and Ulster are my recommendations for transaction reporting and CSV downloads.

They hold a 7 year history online which can be viewed and downloaded or exported for up to a 12 month period at a time. The exported or downloaded files are CSV but can easily be converted to Excel.

The data download has the following columns in the CSV.

Date
Type (eg BACS, DPC etc.)
Description
Value
Balance
Account Name
Account Number

None of the other banks I have used have anywhere near this amount of easily accessible data either online or as a download.

Barclays
First Direct
Halifax
HSBC
Lloyds
Nationwide
NatWest
RBS
Santander
Tesco Bank
Ulster Bank
TSB
Virgin Money

palurie

Thank you – tripled, blue.peter and RG2015! Very helpful