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Which UK banks support FreeAgent-compatible statement download?
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The issue here is that one of the transaction descriptions in your file has a comma in it and the fields in the Abbey CSV file are not enclosed in quotes. Shame on Abbey!
The workaround here is for you to manually remove the comma from the description in question. Hopefully this will resolve the issue.
If you could also contact Abbey and request them to support OFX format statement files, that would be greatly appreciated ;-)
I’m happy we have a workaround but ultimately disappointed (but not surprised) about the quality of Abbey's statement data
The company says
this answers the question
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Astonishingly, some Abbey CSV files seem to have the hyphen in the dates, some don't. FreeAgent supports both formats. Glad to hear it's working for you!
The company says
this answers the question
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Many statement formats have ambiguous dates and Abbey is one of the worst offenders, providing only the day and the month part of the date, e.g. 'Jun-05'.
To make the user experience as painless as possible, FreeAgent applies logic to determine the correct dates when they are ambiguous. With Abbey however, we are somewhat limited in what we can do automatically. By default, FreeAgent will assume the current year when parsing an Abbey statement unless the date with the current year applied is in the future, in which case we assume it was in the previous year.
This should allow you to import your previous 12 months' worth of Abbey statements, but older Abbey data will be incorrectly dated without some intervention. A manual workaround is to edit the CSV file and add the year to the dates yourself. Add the year to the front of the date, so 'Sep-10' becomes '2007-Sep-10' and so on. FreeAgent will then handle the dates correctly.
There are alternative solutions which will involve a second stage of user input, and we're considering these at the moment.
The company says
this answers the question
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FreeAgent uses electronic statement data to help you track money in and out of your business. It accepts electronic statements in one of three formats: OFX (Open Financial Exchange), an older format called QIF (Quicken Interchange Format), and CSV (Comma-Separated Variable) format for a number of other banks who don't support OFX or QIF.
You might see OFX referred to as Quickbooks, Microsoft Money 2005 or Sage Line 50. QIF is sometimes called Quicken 98 or 2000, or Microsoft Money 2003.
The UK banks that support OFX or QIF formats are:
-Abbey (QIF, but not Abbey Business)
-Alliance and Leicester (OFX and QIF)
-Barclays (OFX)
-Clydesdale (QIF)
-Coutts & Co (OFX and QIF)
-First Direct (QIF)
-Halifax (OFX and QIF)
-HSBC (OFX)
-Lloyds (QIF)
-NatWest(OFX)
-Nationwide (OFX)
-Royal Bank of Scotland (OFX and QIF)
-Tesco (OFX and QIF)
-Yorkshire (QIF)
Banks who only allow download as CSV, but that we have added support for, are:
-Abbey Business
-Cater Allen Private Bank
-Co-operative Bank
If your bank is not listed here but supports statement download, or our information is otherwise just plain wrong, please let us know and we'll update our list.
Equally, if your bank only supports CSV downloads and you'd like us to add it to the list, get in touch and send a sample (anonymised if you like, but please keep the formatting the same). We guarantee we'll add support for it within a week.
The company says
this answers the question
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Inappropriate?FreeAgent uses electronic statement data to help you track money in and out of your business. It accepts electronic statements in one of three formats: OFX (Open Financial Exchange), an older format called QIF (Quicken Interchange Format), and CSV (Comma-Separated Variable) format for a number of other banks who don't support OFX or QIF.
You might see OFX referred to as Quickbooks, Microsoft Money 2005 or Sage Line 50. QIF is sometimes called Quicken 98 or 2000, or Microsoft Money 2003.
The UK banks that support OFX or QIF formats are:
-Abbey (QIF, but not Abbey Business)
-Alliance and Leicester (OFX and QIF)
-Barclays (OFX)
-Clydesdale (QIF)
-Coutts & Co (OFX and QIF)
-First Direct (QIF)
-Halifax (OFX and QIF)
-HSBC (OFX)
-Lloyds (QIF)
-NatWest(OFX)
-Nationwide (OFX)
-Royal Bank of Scotland (OFX and QIF)
-Tesco (OFX and QIF)
-Yorkshire (QIF)
Banks who only allow download as CSV, but that we have added support for, are:
-Abbey Business
-Cater Allen Private Bank
-Co-operative Bank
If your bank is not listed here but supports statement download, or our information is otherwise just plain wrong, please let us know and we'll update our list.
Equally, if your bank only supports CSV downloads and you'd like us to add it to the list, get in touch and send a sample (anonymised if you like, but please keep the formatting the same). We guarantee we'll add support for it within a week.
The company says
this answers the question
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Inappropriate?Hi Ed,
A few weeks back I tried to import some previous years bank statements from my Abbey Business account. Due to Abbey not providing the a transaction date that included the year, the import went a bit awry (fair enough). You mentioned that you might be able to work some magic to get around the problem. Has there been any progress with this?
Many thanks, and great work so far.
I’m confident
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Inappropriate?Many statement formats have ambiguous dates and Abbey is one of the worst offenders, providing only the day and the month part of the date, e.g. 'Jun-05'.
To make the user experience as painless as possible, FreeAgent applies logic to determine the correct dates when they are ambiguous. With Abbey however, we are somewhat limited in what we can do automatically. By default, FreeAgent will assume the current year when parsing an Abbey statement unless the date with the current year applied is in the future, in which case we assume it was in the previous year.
This should allow you to import your previous 12 months' worth of Abbey statements, but older Abbey data will be incorrectly dated without some intervention. A manual workaround is to edit the CSV file and add the year to the dates yourself. Add the year to the front of the date, so 'Sep-10' becomes '2007-Sep-10' and so on. FreeAgent will then handle the dates correctly.
There are alternative solutions which will involve a second stage of user input, and we're considering these at the moment.
The company says
this answers the question
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Inappropriate?Great, thanks Olly. I tried adding the year to the transaction date as an experiment a couple of weeks ago, but it didn't work. However, I may have done it incorrectly, so will give it another go.
I’m happy
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Inappropriate?OK, that works great. One small tweak - the date is formatted:
2006Jan10
rather than 2006-Jan-10, but either way might work.
I’m happy
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Inappropriate?Astonishingly, some Abbey CSV files seem to have the hyphen in the dates, some don't. FreeAgent supports both formats. Glad to hear it's working for you!
The company says
this answers the question
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Inappropriate?Hello,
Has anything about the statement upload changed lately? I've just tried to upload my latest statement, but got the message:
"It wasn't possible to process that file. Are you sure you selected the right format?"
I'm using Abbey Business (for my sins). I tried adding the year into the date in the CSV file, but to no avail.
The transaction span 2007 and 2008, if that's any use to you.
Any ideas? Thanks.
I’m sad
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Inappropriate?We haven't changed the statement upload since the original question was asked. Perhaps Abbey have in some way changed their format?
If you could send the CSV file to olly [at] freeagentcentral [.] co [.] uk (replacing transaction names and amounts in the file for privacy if you wish) I'll implement a fix or supply a workaround as soon as possible
I’m confident
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Inappropriate?The issue here is that one of the transaction descriptions in your file has a comma in it and the fields in the Abbey CSV file are not enclosed in quotes. Shame on Abbey!
The workaround here is for you to manually remove the comma from the description in question. Hopefully this will resolve the issue.
If you could also contact Abbey and request them to support OFX format statement files, that would be greatly appreciated ;-)
I’m happy we have a workaround but ultimately disappointed (but not surprised) about the quality of Abbey's statement data
The company says
this answers the question
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