On Sun, Sep 04, 2011 at 06:58:50PM -0400, Peter Silva wrote: > Hi folks, > > I have been using my bank's web site for many years to do banking, but > they are rolling-out a web 3.0 ish extravaganza, and it breaks badly > on my ubuntu. Told them about it, they don't care. Options: > -- switch banks? Anybody know of a bank that explicitly supports > Linux? I am a pretty good customer, would switch over this issue > though. > -- use some mobile/android interface that isn't IE-tastic? > -- other?
What we need ia a bank that will allow downloading of account data in some generic, machine-oriented file format, so that we can write out own code to interpret it. Now the Bank of Nova Scotia appears to use eight-digit numbers to uniquely identify transactions. (maybe that's only for online use? Eight digits seem too short). Now if I could actually get those eight-digit numbers downloaded when I ask it to download, I could mostly automate my account reconciliations, and make sure everthing is reconciled every day. I might still have to indicate which items I had entered ahead of time (such as cheques that took a while to clear), but for the rest of the transactions I'd just have to add any personal information that the bank doesn't know. But having those unique transactino IDs would enable my code to know which transactions were already in the regiter. (I use gnucash, by the way). Instead, all they provide is ascii text (suitable for printing on a 1980-vintage dot-matrix printer) and .qif files, which simply fail to provide enough information (such as account identity) to identify one transaction as being just one transaction when it's a transfer between two files. Ugh. There must be standard file formats for this kind of data already. The banks must use them amongst themselves. Why can't we? -- hendrik _______________________________________________ mlug mailing list [email protected] https://listes.koumbit.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mlug-listserv.mlug.ca
