It’s true. The ANZ online banking web site has undergone some recent changes. Apart from a face lift, I’m not sure what else has changed.

I use Microsoft Money to keep track of my savings and expenses. Money works great if you live in the US… alot of banks either let you connect to them directly or give you Money friendly file formats to download your transactions.

I have an ANZ credit card, and they have a feature where you can download transactions into Money but it’s not automated. You have to choose your dates, then ANZ will generate the file for you that you can download and open in Money.

But as a result of their changes, when you download transactions, charges appear as payments!

I emailed ANZ to complain.

“Downloading my transactions into Microsoft Money 2006 doesn’t work properly. In the past, I would use the Quicken option and everything would work but now the Charges appear as Credits in the application.”

The Microsoft Money option you have in the web page is an .ofc file which is a very old Money standard and does not work for Money 2005 and above.”

Please let your programmers know and hopefully you can change it cause it’s a feature I use alot.”

This was their reply:

“Thank you for your SecureMail regarding your inability to download transaction history to MS Money.

We wish to inform you that we are aware of this issue and our Internet Banking Technicians are looking into this matter on an urgent basis. However, till this issue is fixed, regrettably, you will not be able to download to MS Money.”

We apologize for the inconvenience caused to you.”

Big help you are ANZ.

Fortunately, I have found a simple solution. Simply download the file in qif (Quicken) format, open it in a text editor (Notepad) and add a negative sign to all purchases. Similarly, remove all negative signs for payments.

So, this:

D05/10/2006
T72.95
PFITNESS FIRST AUST SYDNEY
^

Should be changed to

D05/10/2006
T-72.95
PFITNESS FIRST AUST SYDNEY
^

UPDATE: ANZ appears to have fixed this. Hooray!