Folks:
It is time to start thinking about taxes. I am interested in downloading 2014 transactions from two banks that offer online banking. One offers 12 months of transactions from their database (i.e., 11 out of 12 months of 2014). The other can go back for 3 months. Given the cost of hard drives and servers, why can’t I get all of my transactions for 2014? Google keeps 10 years of my email. What would be hard about keeping 5-10 years of numbers and short text strings for financial transactions?
I think mint.com stores your transactions indefinitely.
https://mint.lc.intuit.com/questions/1005113-how-long-will-mint-com-store-my-data
Because their DBAs talked them into partitioning their tables to improve performance!
Probably some organizational dysfunction in their IT departments causing the systems that support online banking (usually distinct from the mainframe-based core banking systems) to be starved of resources. Keep in mind also that enterprise storage is significantly more expensive (by a factor of 10x), not that it should matter as PDFs made from the originals (i.e. not scans) are fairly small.
A better question would be: why don’t they just email the statements to you? I believe they do in Japan, as long as you have a S/MIME key on file to encrypt the email. The NSA has done a very good job of keeping encryption inconvenient and hard to use, and that may have to do with this sorry situation.
It is probably company policy in order to avoid some kind of liability.
At the pharma company I work for, they call it “records retention”. Unless saved, all emails must be deleted after 3 months. After 2 years saved emails must be deleted. In the case of an FDA investigation, this minimizes the self incriminating evidence.
I smell lawyers at work. If the bank only promises retention of 3-12 months, they can’t be held responsible when somebody wants to dig something out of the more distant past.
I don’t think it is lawyers or record retention since they keep years worth of statements in PDF format.
Because banks are still paying 1980s storage prices for their 1980s IBM mainframes + DASDs (hard drives)?
I think it’s greed. Many banks will gladly provide you with earlier statements for a fee.
I download the previous year’s worth (checking account) every January from my credit union (ComTrust). The export dialog lets you fill in custom dates. I export in CSV format. Works fine, helps with taxes.
Chase VISA sends me a year-end summary in January of all transactions for the previous year. Chase also has a great online search feature for past transactions.
Regions Bank in Sreepoat LA lets me download transactions for any range of dates on multiple criteria. I haven’t checked how far back it goes, but it’s at least a year, so a few minutes in January are all it takes to stay on top.
interesting, same here in Germany can only go back about three months