Importing from online brokers/banks to personal finance software

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Hogwild
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Importing from online brokers/banks to personal finance software

Post by Hogwild »

Hi everyone:

After reading yet another informative thread here, I'm considering whether it would be worth it for me to get all my financial data into some sort of personal finance software. I'm leaning towards KMyMoney. Now, I read in one thread that you cannot download all your historical transactions from TD Direct Investing website. They don't have that feature (which I complained about in an email). Do CIBC IE allow you to do that? I tried it with BMO Investorline, but it only allowed me to download about a year or 18-months worth. What about CIBC?

Does anyone else feel like harrassing TD to try to get them to implement that feature?
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AltaRed
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Re: Importing from online brokers/banks to personal finance software

Post by AltaRed »

Why do you need to download all historical data going back several years? The starting point is not really all that relevant. It is what you do with the data from point A forward in time. Having a year's worth of historical data seems perfectly good to me.

Example: I started with digital data in 1995 via Quicken and kept records through an early 2008 divorce. I then started 'anew' with a new data set and obviously didn't miss any of that earlier data one bit since I never went back to look at any of it.
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Hogwild
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Re: Importing from online brokers/banks to personal finance software

Post by Hogwild »

Well, okay. How do you decide how far back to go? And I take it there is no way to go back even a year to get TDDI transaction records? How about CIBC?
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Re: Importing from online brokers/banks to personal finance software

Post by OnlyMyOpinion »

From TDDI, I can download monthly statements as pdf's from the past 6 years (to Feb 2010) - ten at a time :(. These show monthly activity and holdings.
As a collated pdf file you can easily search for a company name to strip out its transactions (for buys, sells, drips, acb calcs...). If you need earlier, then you're stuck with the paper you've saved. I 'grew up' having to go through the paper manualy, so pdf's are a vast improvement.
You are correct that downloading TDDI activity as a csv-type file appears limited to the year-to-date activity. It's not something I've had occasion to have to use routinely.
I agree with AltaRed - unless you are trying to capture historical activity related to your acb, it is not reallly necessary.
For posterity I just keep the old Royal Trust passbook showing the first $2000 we deposited into a RRSP.
Hogwild
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Re: Importing from online brokers/banks to personal finance software

Post by Hogwild »

OnlyMyOpinion:

What do you mean by a "collated PDF file". I've never heard of that.
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Re: Importing from online brokers/banks to personal finance software

Post by pmj »

OnlyMyOpinion wrote:From TDDI, I can download monthly statements as pdf's from the past 6 years (to Feb 2010) - ten at a time :(.
Recently(?) upgraded to allow 12 at a time :-).
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OnlyMyOpinion
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Re: Importing from online brokers/banks to personal finance software

Post by OnlyMyOpinion »

PMJ,
You're right, up to 12 monthly statements can can be checked off and downladed at once. It is the confirmation slips that are limited to 10 for some reason - I'd like to be able to check off and download the full year's worth of confirmation slips, not just 10.
Note that you must check off each monthly statement in the correct order (from Jan>Dec), not just randomly check them all off, otherwise the pdf will not be saved in order from Jan>Dec.

Hogwild,
By collated, I just meant that you can have a full year's monthly statements saved together in one searchable pdf file. I save a pdf file of each account for each year for my records.
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Re: Importing from online brokers/banks to personal finance software

Post by Hogwild »

OnlyMyOpinion:

Yeah, I hear you. I'm just not sure how helpful that is in terms of getting data into KMyMoney or other personal finance software. The column names are different and often in a different order for each broker. It would just be sOOOOOOO much easier if we could download this stuff. From an IT point of view, that would be easy to implement-just a simple database query, and the formatting of the data for that query. I can't unerstand why they don't let us do it.

Anyways, back to the grindstone.
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