# Getting your bank account data in electronic format



## pony (3 Jan 2011)

Hi, 

Could not find any similar posts with a search so starting new thread. 

Has anyone any experience getting electronic data dumps from your irish bank account? basically i really just want a csv file with my account information that i can then use to manage my finances each month or so in an excel file or some such. 

im with aib and the closest i can get is a copy and paste from their online statement but problem here is the transactions in that view only go back a month or so and so i cannot access all the historic data this way. i can view pdf's of my statements online but if i try copy and paste the data structure is messy/hard to parse. i did hear the BOI and UB can provide data extracts - has anyone any experience with this?

my questions are - has anyone either found ways to copy and handle the data from an aib estatement pdf and play with it in excel for example or alternativley has anyone any experience getting their data from aib in a structured way like a csv file?

thanks all


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## losttheplot (3 Jan 2011)

This is something I'd wished for too. I was using some home accounting software that did plots and charts of your spending, I was copying and pasting to excel, tidying the data and then entering. If it was in .csv format it could be imported directly.

Can you imagine how snazzy an on-line banking site would be that showed charts of your balance over time. I think it would be a great marketing opportunity for a bank - but since when did they listen to what their customers want.


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## Mpsox (4 Jan 2011)

Ulsterbank Anytime banking has the facility to do this, there is a tab on there for downloading transactions in a CSV file to Excel or as a OFC/OFX file to Micorsoft Money.


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## Complainer (4 Jan 2011)

NIB allow you to export to CSV


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## AlbacoreA (5 Jan 2011)

losttheplot said:


> This is something I'd wished for too. I was using some home accounting software that did plots and charts of your spending, I was copying and pasting to excel, tidying the data and then entering. If it was in .csv format it could be imported directly.
> 
> Can you imagine how snazzy an on-line banking site would be that showed charts of your balance over time. I think it would be a great marketing opportunity for a bank - but since when did they listen to what their customers want.



+1 I do the cut and paste thing too, but really, its 2011 we should be able to get a download.


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## pony (9 Jan 2011)

my simplistic way to try work around this was going to be paste the text from the pdf into col A in an excel sheet then use various tests and conditions to try parse it myself and then just go though each line and assigning it to particular categories to track spending. 

things like when a line has a ":" in it it is just a datestamp AIB put in so not relevant, also if line has no numbers then obviously line is not relevant etc (could also look for particular lines such as "Date Details Debit € Credit € Balance €" and "Surcharges-See Notice at Branch" as these are always top and bottom of a block of transactions)- this will cut out some of the rubbish and then you are left with lot of rows from which you would have to pull out the "0000.00" type bits to put the numbers into cells then you just go down through each row and assign it accordingly.

might try make a stab at it at if i can - feel free to help out or have a go yourself if you are in any way interested - never really tried to parse text in excel so not too confident how successful i'll be. 

given amount of people banking with AIB though i'd say anything half way decent would be really useful.

will post link if i ever get anything together - effort involved prob beats sitting and manually inputting data.


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## Complainer (9 Jan 2011)

pony said:


> my simplistic way to try work around this was going to be paste the text from the pdf into col A in an excel sheet then use various tests and conditions to try parse it myself



The 'Data - Text to Columns' feature of Excel might speed this up.


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## losttheplot (9 Jan 2011)

I think the web page is an XML type file and was thinking of parsing the raw file somehow. However, just playing around with it now I've realised if I select and copy all the relevant rows on the web page, and use "Paste Special" and select the "HTML Format" (this is in OpenOffice Calc but I'd imagine Excel will do it too) it pastes in quite nicely. Even the dates were recognised as dates. Once in the spreadsheet program it can be saved as a .csv.

I was using software called HomeBank to track spending etc but gave up because of the manual entry. I may give it another go now as I think it can import .csv files. You should be able to get more than a months transactions from the web also.

I think it would be a wonderful selling point for a bank to provide this type of tracking tool with it's online service. Or even phone companies - giving a graph showing who you call and text the most (and when).

Maybe since we now own AIB we can ask them to do it.

Let me know if this works for anyone else.


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## spoon1236 (10 Jan 2011)

Just tried what Losttheplot suggested, ie. copying the relevant bank information from my PTSB website and pasting it into OpenOffice Calc 3.  It worked really well, each piece of information into their own cell.  I also tried Microsoft Excel 2007, but this didn't work, all data was pasted into 1 cell.  
So for anyone who wants an electronic form of their online bank detail, you will need OpenOffice, which is free and available for download from openoffice.org.  Thanks Losttheplot.


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## pony (10 Jan 2011)

tried a bit more on this in work where i have adobe acrobat - if you highlight the table on the pdf between the two lines i mention above and then right click and say 'save as table' or 'open table in spreadsheet' you get a csv file spaced as you would expect and you can then do whatever you want with the data from there. only pain now is that you have to copy and save table/open table from each individual page. painful but better than nothing.

note: the 'table' options are available when you open the pdf where acrobat is installed

re: OpenOffice - am i missing something here - if i just copy and paste from aib online into excel 2007 it goes in fine - my problem was that as aib only show you a month or so online this approach means you need to do it each month however if i miss a month then i cant get the data and end up with gaps in my accounts. 

i had been doing it each month but it gets a bit of a pain so if i could do it every few months this would be much better - so say aib where to show 6 months data online then that would be fine and i'd have no problem as long as i do it every 6 months.


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## pony (10 Jan 2011)

got better way to handle the pdfs (as long as you have adobe acrobat - i think, not sure if it works in adobe reader):

when viewing you aib estatement pdf  (in adobe acrobat) go to

file>save as>tables in excel spreadsheet

then every second spreadsheet is a relevant table. 

think its driven from the xml tags in the pdf -  not sure though as dont really know much about xml.

so basically download all your statements and combine the files in acrobat into one file and then just save that as tables in excel and then a little messing with getting the sheets in excel onto one single one and you should have your data.

have not had chance to try this yet but looks like it should work


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## losttheplot (10 Jan 2011)

Hi Pony, just tried that with Adobe Reader 9, no option to save as an Excel file so it didn't work.

It probably depends on the amount of activity on your account, but when I clicked "View all recent transactions", it goes back to August. If you want to send me your bank details and password I'll take a look ;-)

Why don't we all mail AIB and see what response we get.


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## Bfreesun (8 Feb 2011)

We rang AIB and it took a while to explain why we wanted to export data from our online account. The very helpful customer services guy suggested the estatements service. Unfortunately it's in PDF. Not much use. Lloyds has an export option right on the page and it worked seamlessly with Money3

As one of the first customers of AIB's online business banking I'm afraid they've always been a behind the curve with online services. Their excuse to us was always security


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## jpd (8 Feb 2011)

The real reason was  that setting it up would cost money and that would have reduced the bank's profits and the bankers' bonuses


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## marksa (8 Feb 2011)

If you are all moaning about the poor functionality of AIB (and I believe BoI is no better) why don't you switch to a better provider like Ulster or NIB mentioned? AIB and BoI are broke and can't spend a penny on more than the absolute bare essential technical work required to keep them in line with regulator requirements. Vote with your feet rather than moan and looking at such bizarre solutions as parsing pdfs etc. I have huge amount of transactions through my current accounts - at least 7 pages worth a month as I do everything electronically - laser/credit card etc and i had to fiddle around with pdfs i'd go mad!


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## Satanta (9 Feb 2011)

marksa said:


> ...why don't you switch to a better provider like Ulster or NIB mentioned?


While Ulster do provide the export option and are innovating a little faster than others in certain areas (early[ish] adopters of visa debit etc.), I wouldn't consider their online banking to be good (or anywhere approaching it). Personally, I hate it and find many of the other banks (while still greatly flawed in many ways) far more user friendly. Lost count of how many times I've wanted to hop one of those card readers against the wall. 

The sooner we see a Mint like option for Irish banking (I've given up on waiting for the banks to provide the functionality themselves), the better.


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## selfassessed (6 Jan 2014)

marksa said:


> If you are all moaning about the poor functionality of AIB (and I believe BoI is no better) why don't you switch to a better provider like Ulster or NIB mentioned? AIB and BoI are broke and can't spend a penny on more than the absolute bare essential technical work required to keep them in line with regulator requirements. Vote with your feet rather than moan and looking at such bizarre solutions as parsing pdfs etc. I have huge amount of transactions through my current accounts - at least 7 pages worth a month as I do everything electronically - laser/credit card etc and i had to fiddle around with pdfs i'd go mad!



I did exactly that and moved to NIB because they allowed me to export CSV files but now NIB are kicking me out so I have to go back to AIB.  Is there still no option to export for personal banking?  I can do it at work with IIB (which is a fantastic tool) but can't justify spending 200 euro a year for personal banking.


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