Aral Balkan

I have an HSBC Advance account. It's a premium personal current account (ok, you can stop looking at me like I'm a fool – I get travel insurance and stuff. OK, OK, and I'm gullible!) You would think that one feature of a current account in this day and age, whether premium or not, would be the ability download previous statements in a data format or some sort.

In fact, for some inexplicable reason which must make perfect sense to you if you're a fat cat making billions after being bailed out by taxpayer's – i.e., our – money, HSBC allows you to do download statements in a variety of formats but only for recent transactions. As of this writing, my recent transactions only go as far back as the start of January, 2011. I also have access to "previous statements" that date back to the start of last year but – and it's a big but – I can't download them. I can print them but that's about it. WTF indeed.

Since I've recently started using the excellent FreeAgent and I really want to get a grip on my finances and accounting, I need to import my personal bank transactions into FreeAgent alongside my business accounts. This braindead artificial limitation imposed by HSBC was stopping me from doing that. So I fixed it. And with that, I give you the HSBC Prepare CSV bookmarket.

Installation

→ HSBC Prepare CSV ←

You see the link above? (Yes, the one pointed to by the arrows!) Drag it to your browser's bookmark toolbar to create a bookmarklet.

That's it, you're done!

Usage

1. Sign in to your HSBC Personal account and navigate to a previous statement.
2. Click the "HSBC Prepare CSV" bookmarklet you created earlier.
3. A little copy-to-clipboard icon will be inserted into your statement. Click it to copy the generated CSV to your system clipboard.
4. In your text editor of choice, create a new file and paste the generated CSV into it.
5. Save the file with a meaningful name like 2011-02-07-HSBC-Personal.csv (as opposed to a generic statement.csv or transactions.csv as HSBC's system insists on naming files when it does allow you to download them</rantOff>).

Once you've downloaded your statements using the above process, you can upload them to FreeAgent.

I hope you enjoy using the bookmarklet and that it helps you with your bookkeeping/accounting.

(It is my sincerest hope that HSBC will fix this huge oversight and that this bookmarklet will not be needed for much longer. If this blog post helps to shame them into doing it, all the better.)

Freeagent

If you like the bookmarklet and haven't heard of FreeAgent yet, why not sign up with my referral code – 3aixj8xt – (or via one of the links in this article), and we'll both get 10% off.

Details

The generated CSV is in the AMEX CSV format published by FreeAgent. This is the simplest CSV format they accept and the only one that is currently published.

You can see the source code for the HSBC Prepare CSV script here to make sure that it's not doing anything nefarious with your bank data.

I am talking to the lovely folks at FreeAgent at the moment to see if we can't capture a bit more of the information from HSBC personal accounts in a slightly more involved CSV format in the future.

Credits

The HSBC Prepare CSV bookmarklet would not have been possible without the following resources and components:

• Roan Lavery for FreeAgent and for pointing me to the CSV file format and for general friendship, help, and patience with a guy who currently hates accounting but is trying to hate it less.
• jQuery, the awesome JavaScript library that makes DOM traversal (as well as other things) a CSS-selector-esque piece of cake.
• Clippy, the little Flash-based copy-to-clipboard component.
• jQuery FlashEmbed, which I'm using to embed Clippy into the statement.
• The Squidoo article by echo85 for showing me how to lazy load jQuery and, similarly, the Coding in Paradise article on Creating Huge Bookmarklets.

Comments

• Hi Aral, I decided to check out your blog after I found your wp inline posts item. You might like to know that HSBC's madness extends to their First Direct accounts. This is an internet only banking service where, yes you guessed it, you can only get access to your statements for a limited period. It becomes even more frustrating when you try to get your older (read over three months old) credit card statements. You can not do so! I challenged them about this. The response was that it is the fault of the Credit card companies. So billionaire banks and global credit card companies cannot let us have our data, odd isn't it? Well hello, at a time when almost all of us have either given up, or been forced into giving paper statements these folk expect us to have even less service as we continue to pay more as we bail them out of the morass they created. In contrast, your work combined with that of others is truly liberating as it gives us back what they 'cannot'. Thank you, Andy

  by Andy Renals on 2011-03-06 10:15:22

• Wow - I wish someone would do this for Royal Bank of Scotland too! Although hopefully FreeAgent are pretty close now to getting bank feeds working with Yodlee. That will be great. Kudos Aral for a great bit of hacking! Colin

  by Colin on 2011-02-15 12:10:18

• Hey good work Aral - can't believe noone else has congratulated you on doing and sharing this here. Thanks!

  by Emily Heath on 2011-03-09 11:41:08

• Hey Aral, You might want to check out Xero (www.xero.com), which has automated HSBC bank feeds - I'm not sure how it stacks up against FreeAgent as I've only ever used Xero, but I've been very impressed with it so far. Ben

  by Ben Smith on 2011-02-17 00:15:32

• oh whoops - earlier comments are in the side column - missed those!

  by Emily again on 2011-03-09 11:42:21

• This was EXACTLY what I was looking for. Thanks for making that, it's frustrating that you can't export data of older transactions!

  by Leo on 2011-05-04 17:11:31

• Amazing. Thank you so much for preparing this. Wish I hadn't upgraded to HSBC advance now as my accounts without this with HSBC are able to just download the date ranges required in CSV.

  by Andy on 2011-07-17 13:32:11

• Thanks, this is really helpful.

  by Adam Johnson on 2011-07-21 15:53:00

• Awesome! I've been looking for something like this for years! Very tempted to move banks. Thanks a million. Am using Money Dashboard at the moment but that has just broken due to HSBC's new security widget. Might now try FeeAgent.

  by Jon on 2011-09-05 13:10:47

• Hi Aral, I was referred to your script from free agent site. I was looking at the code and was curious why you used adobe's flash here? and why not greasemonkey? Cheers M

  by meitham on 2011-08-25 19:26:08

• Thanks again for sharing this Aral - my Smile version of the CSV scraper is now online at http://simianstudios.com/blog/post/smile-csv-scraper-for-freeagent-and-xero For the benefit of anyone reading this who fancies having a go at doing one for their own bank, I found it very easy to modify Aral's code - it's all nicely commented so you just need to follow down the lines and tweak as appropriate. I had my version 99% done in half an hour, with just a couple of little tweaks and some testing after that.

  by Kris Noble on 2012-01-10 15:38:08

• This doesn't work for me (Jan 2012). Is this compatible with the recent HSBC site refresh?

  by Dan on 2012-01-19 08:40:58

• Hi Aral. I followed your instructions but it doesn't seem to be working. Does this bookmarklet still work for you? I'm wondering if HSBC have updated their site and this no longer works. It could be a real life saver for me if I can get it to work! Thanks, Kyle

  by Kyle Bean on 2012-01-14 10:47:45

• HMMM....thanks for this - but I wonder if HSBC have changed the format of their statements. Where once this worked perfectly, now I have to click it twice to get it to work and it doesn't capture the transaction type, only the date, desc. and amount!

  by DAN on 2012-01-24 21:53:10

• Damn, that's *awesome*! Any chance of something for the Barclays accounts that suffer from the same woeful situation?

  by Gary Stanton on 2012-01-05 19:44:06

• Cheers for the fantastic script Aral. I tweaked it a bit to export OFX files as well as CSV so I'll have to share the code for that with you seeming you did most the hard work in the first place!

  by Lee Theobald on 2012-02-15 22:38:15

• Thanks very much for this really useful tool Aral! You've just made my life sooo much easier. Shame no-one at HSBC is onn the ball enough to sort this out. Probably too busy licking their lips! Thanks again! Danny

  by DannyH on 2012-02-05 16:49:40

• You just saved me tears, frustration and a possible trip to the sanitarium. Thank you!

  by sophie on 2012-05-08 15:09:39

• Hi Aral Nice work. I've modified your script so that it opens the pop-ups to get the extra detail for each transaction. Source code here http://www.cochranedavey.com/extras/hsbc-previous-statement-processor.js Cheers Evan

  by Evan on 2012-04-20 21:22:30

• June 2012: You have to click twice with a pause in between to get this to work on HSBC's ordinary account Statement page and then load each page to copy it to the clipboard. The bookmarklet seems like the only way to get data to an application but it's a disgrace in this day and age that they don't allow you to request a single download in a common format by entering a date range. I've got almost four years of statements to consolidate and it'll probably take hours. Thanks for your work on this Aral.

  by LivingCM on 2012-07-02 04:05:22

• Brilliant. You are a legend! I am in exactly the same position, with the exact same request, and was told the best they could do was send me a chunk of paper for £10. You my friend, are brilliant!

  by Evan on 2012-08-25 14:46:48

• Thanks, Aral! Just what the doctor ordered to complete my private tax return... Other banks unfortunately are not providing better service - I have more accounts and would probably need a script for each to make the downloads work!

  by Peter Croy on 2012-07-13 20:50:59

• hi there... the script is not working for me. All that gets pasted is "HSBC prepare CSV statement". Do I need something in particular to be installed?

  by James on 2012-11-07 15:13:15