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2008-04-11 17:14 |
[personal] Minor gripe about American business |
Public |
Nuevo Rancho Lake |
taxed |
the ticking of the grandfather clock |
personal |
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One thing I don't understand about online banking and billing systems is why the historical views are so limited. I cannot possibly be the only person in the United States who wants to look at their entire 2007 utility/cell phone/bank payment/etc. account history around tax time. Yet most sites give you either the past quarter, or the past 12 (or 13) months at best.
This seems like such a basic part of customer expectation.
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icedrake |
2008-04-12 01:02 (UTC) |
(no subject) |
Because they can charge you for archive access? (which they do, brutally, and not just in the US)
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Because usually people are just doing a quick check to make sure that they paid the bill last month and how much they've paid for the last few? I know that's what I use it for. If I want to know more than that I go to my Quicken which lets me go back for Many Years. Full search by who what where when with notes on what is deductible, etc. Can also do a deductible printout and just hand it to the tax person. And yes, I download and save all my bank and credit card statements too. But that's only in case I need a printout of something, I don't have to go find it in the storage boxes. Storage on the disk is so cheap these days...
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icedrake |
2008-04-12 05:10 (UTC) |
(no subject) |
Heck, my bank will only do *one* month, and even that is through the worst interface this side of the Iron Maiden. (A slight exaggeration perhaps, but I'm sure the Inquisition would have found a use for four nested drop-down menus)
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rosefox |
2008-04-12 05:25 (UTC) |
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Citibank's site will show me online bill payment totals by payee and calendar year. It only does this year and last year, but it's still super useful, since I pay all my bills through their site. I have some issues with how they run the company, but I've never had a complaint with their online banking services, going back to when I had to get the software on a floppy disk and dialed into their modem bank.
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jetse |
2008-04-12 12:53 (UTC) |
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It's why I keep paper copies of all my financial transactions.
And thankfully I already did my taxes...;-)
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jaylake |
2008-04-12 13:34 (UTC) |
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Well, yes, I keep paper copies too. But yanking a table off a Web site into a spreadsheet is so much easier than going file-diving, then transcribing...
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As an IT guy at a bank, I can tell you the amount of history available depends a lot on core processing systems. We outsource our core to a 3rd party, which only provides to us so many months online. We could I suppose pay extra to get more online data, but we're trying to keep costs down so we archive the data.
As it happens, our Internet banking system is by a different company, and they give 2 years history to people who've been signed up for that long. Most 3rd party systems don't, again due to cost issues.
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jaylake |
2008-04-12 23:21 (UTC) |
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I work in IT (marketing side), and I see this kind of stuff all the time at work. Cost of storage argument boggles me there, too, given the rapid sinking in $/GB of media...
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Costs may be sinking, but we're still getting billed for it. There's also some speed of access issues too...
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I go to my checkbook to add up my utility bills come tax time. I keep a pretty detailed checkbook.
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