Downloading Discover Card Acct. Data

Jon Hamkins hamkins at alumni.caltech.edu
Fri Jun 24 00:27:58 EDT 2005


Jerry Smith wrote:
 > Discover Card only allows downloads initiated through Quicken and
 > Money.  Has anybody come up with a work-around for downloading
 > Discover Card data? I have Quicken but prefer to use Gnucash. I
 > suppose I can download to Quicken and then export/import to Gnucash
 > but that's a nuisance. Jerry

A good way to use online banking downloads is with with OFX files, also
known by Quicken users as web-connect or direct-connect.  Use the script
ofx.py at http://jongsma.org/gc/ to download the OFX file, then import
it into gnucash.  The script already has the server information for
Discover, so you should be set.  This method can be used for any
financial institution for which the OFX server is known, and I
understand the latest gnucash builds enable downloading directly from
within the program.

For some financial institutions, the OFX server details may not be
known, or available information may be outdated.  This used to be the
case, anyway.  Try the other scripts at the same site to get the server
information.  I had no luck with the download scripts, or rather, I had
luck downloading the XML files but they all seemed to be encrypted.

If you can't find the information for a financial institution, there is
still another option.  Check if you can login to the financial
institution website to get an OFX file.  If you find you can, you can
use a script that performs this manual web-browsing process.  This has
the nice side benefit that you can just have it store your monthly
statements in HTML or PDF or whatever, as well.

I have accumulated several scripts to automatically login to a website
and download OFX and/or monthly statements, for various institutions
(Bank of America, Verizon, SBC, Charter Communications, US Bank, etc.) If
anyone wants them, let me know, I'll throw them up on a web site.

      ----Jon



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