Importing Smile Bank Statements Into MoneyDance 4 comments

One of my New Year resolutions has been to keep better track of my finances. As such I’ve started using the excellent accounting package MoneyDance, which is available on Windows, Mac and Linux, for a mere $50. The big stumbling block I had, was importing bank statements into the package; there’s no way I’m typing every transaction in. Although MoneyDance can connect directly to some banks to retrieve statements and can import common file formats like QIX, OFX, QFX and CSV, none of these were readily available from my bank. I’m with the UK bank Smile, which is an online banking subsidiary of the Co-Operative banking group. Smile merely give you an online HTML page per bank statement, that’s it. I’m no longer smiling.

Being a resourceful programmer, I set about the problem and put together some code to import Smile bank statements into MoneyDance. In brief, this involves saving your bank statement as a HTML page, converting the page to XHTML, then running an XSLT transform to convert it to the universal OFX format, which can then be imported into MoneyDance.
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