Hey, any other federal workers out there? My agency stopped mailing us our earnings & leave statements (pay stubs, as everyone else would call them) years ago. I protested that they should at least let us opt in to having them mailed, to no avail. There isn't even a way to have them e-mailed.
But we can get them online, through our payroll processor's website (the USDA National Finance Center.) So finally I have written a script to download them automatically. It uses zsh and curl to download the earnings and leave statements in HTML form. Of course if they change the website that will break it. But after learning curl this actually wasn't too hard to write, so it could be fixed...maybe I will even start scraping other interesting Web things. With the statement in HTML form I can then use an awk script I previously wrote (along with elinks -dump) to make an entry in my books for Ledger, the commnad-line accounting tool. It sure would be nice if they made these things available in XML...oh well. At any rate if you too are paid through the National Finance Center you might find the script useful. Email me and I can send it to you. --Omari
