Online financial idiocy

(Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes)

The bank where I have my personal checking will allow approximately 60 rolling window for downloading financial data electronically. Anything after that, they provide convenient pdf files, of images of the SCANNED PAPER STATEMENT!!!
Paypal, same thing: rolling 60 day window.
My business bank allows a 6 month window. But get this: you can’t get the electronic statement up to date. You can only get within two days of the last transactions. Example: It’s March 25. The last transaction was March 23. I can only download transactions to March 21. And no, it isn’t a “Sunday” thing. I have tried this during weekdays. Same problem. What it means is I have to enter the last couple of transactions by hand, every single time. Which is bullshit.

Why is this?

Why is it so hard to access your own data?

It would seem to me that if you have enough authorization to completely drain your bank account online, you ought to be able to look at your transactions. Somehow, I can’t help but feel that if the FBI, the Secret Service, the NSA or whatever “entity” wanted such data, they would get it. Instantly.

So this “we don’t store data on our servers more than 60/90/whatever days” just seems like bullshit to me.

Can anyone set me straight here?

I would genuinely like to know, because I very often end up doing manual data entry for time periods I missed.

[Update:] Just to be a little more clear on this. At the very minimum, I am tracking several bank accounts at different banks, several credit and debit cards attached to different accounts, an investment portfolio with several accounts, and a paypal account. And don’t tell me “use Quicken.” Been there, done that. For example, at least one of my banks won’t talk to Quicken in anything other than CSV format, which is the same problem above, in disguise. For credit cards you have to get a PIN using snail mail. WTF? Yeah, you have ask for a PIN to be sent by snail mail, which completely defeats the purpose of sitting down and knocking it out. I tried it a couple of times. It never worked reliably for me anyway.

Essentially, despite the relative technological simplicity of the problem at hand (Transaction number, Date, Amount, Running balance, Description) I am reduced to either manually transferring at least some data by hand (using paper and pencil), or cutting and pasting into a text editor for reformatting, or both. Seriously, this problem just isn’t that fucking hard. Every single account has the same information. The only differences are record order in the field, and debit formatting. Cripes.

At the moment, I have resigned myself to downloading csv files manually, and hand-editing to resolve duplicates. Sucks.