How to pull bank statements from websites?

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Naftuli Kay picture Naftuli Kay · Apr 7, 2011 · Viewed 27.4k times · Source

I need to pull bank account statements from a number of different sources. I'd love to be able to get this data in some sort of standardized fashion, be it CSV or OFX or XML or whatever. I just need to be able to get this data. I'll be using my own account to grab transactions from, so there shouldn't be too many 'legal' problems there. How do sites like Mint.com get bank statements? They simply ask for your account information, the URL, and then they're off and running. How can I do this?

Answer

holygeek picture holygeek · Apr 7, 2011

Write a screen scraper in your favorite language to do it. Automate it away.

Normally banks give you access up to three months of transactions via their online services.

Don't forget to make it push the panic button when the screen scraping fails.

The main point here is to automate it so that the pain (of running it manually) goes away so that all you see are "constantly" updated transactions of your accounts.

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