Suggestions on a workflow for my bank statements

[GreyGray 15]

Hello, I am looking for some guidance on a workflow for my bank statements.

 

I went paperless a little while back, and will have to scan in some of my few years ago statements since I don't want to keep the paper.

 

I am having a hard time figuring a way to organize these things.  

 

I have a few bank categories

Bank of My County

Credit card from Bank of My County

Bank of Main Mega Corp

Credit Card of a Mega Corp

Misc docs that come in attached to one of the above on occasion, like a year end tax paper, or a change in terms of service etc.

 

Right now, I put them in a folder called Financials, within a folder for each of the above named items, and within those, there is a year, such as 2014, 2013, 2012, etc, and I just dump anything I want into the folder for that year.  It is on an encrypted sparse bundle

 

I can keep doing it that way, or I can move them into Evernote.  I tried the above folder structure but you can't go more than one level in a notebook, so I am stuck there.  I thought about how to just put it all in one folder for each bank and use tags, but felt I would spend a lot of time in Evernote.  I love to just enter it in and forget about it.

 

The files are named from the bank, they are pdf files and I just click "download" and they are given a name, some have slashes in the names, which Evernote converts to : which makes it look like a time stamp.  Some are spelled out dates like October 1, 2012.  I take it Evernote likes dots between dates, at least for importing files?  I  guess I could just rename them to 3-2012, 4-2012, etc, I don't need more than the month and year, but that is kinda a paid.  

 

Sort of lost of this one, if I should even put them in Evernote, or keep the method I am using. My method is more secure, but I have had sparse bundles die, and with all but one backup system honoring all the Mac's extended attributes on a file, I know for a fact that uploading a sparse bundle or image will nuke it to near all online backup services on the Mac.  Anything with a resource fork or data fork and you are going to hurt your file.

 

Suggestion from anyone who has been down this road?

[CalS 5,280]

You could create a local notebook in EN on your desktop, Statements if you will, and put them all your statements in there.  If the note titles have bank name and date in them, then that's all you need and you could do searches like "bank.name" "2014" and get all of the statements for that year.  You do have to do your own backups to other media with a local notebook, I use the ENEX format, same as backing up a folder structure I suppose,  If you put the statements in a synced notebook then the EN servers are a backup of sorts for most things other than you deleting a note, so you still need a backup strategy for synced notebooks.

 

If you decide to put the statements in EN, you could consider adding tags for the banks and years and use those to tag the notes.  This is what I do, FWIW.  In either case you get the benefits of searching the PDFs by having the statements in EN. But if all you are looking for is backup and you are okay with statement data on the web, Dropbox or something with stronger security could be a solution.

[GreyGray 15]

I have toyed with the idea of a local notebook, but that only solved security and backup issues.  I can't rely on the dates of the files as they are set by the bank, and Evernote converts them in all sorts of interesting ways.  Make a text file dated as 01/01/15 and see what the title is when you import it, it will be 1:1:15 which looks more like a time than a date.  There are other strange conversions as well which make me not trust the date formats it is setting.

 

One thing I have been thinking, since this notebook will be collapsed most of the time, is that I can fill it up as much as I want and it won't really get in my way, so I could have:

Banking - ( This is my main notebook, all the rest are sub-collections of that notebook )

- Super Bank Credit Card 2015

- Super Bank Credit Card 2014

- Super Bank Credit Card 2013

- Super Bank Credit Card 2012

- Super Bank Credit Card 2011

- Local Bank 2015

- Local Bank 2014

- Local Bank 2013

- Local Bank 2012

- Local Bank 2011

- Local Bank Credit Card 2015 ...

and so and snd so forth.  I would put anything in each folder for that year, could be statements, notices, whatever is sent from that institution in that year or posted online from that institution that year.

 

So far, that is the only way I can think do organize these in any way.  I could go through all the files and rename them to the proper date, but I would have to figure out how EN wants the date of the filename.  Any suggestions on a date format that EN will import and not alter?

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

Hello, I am looking for some guidance on a workflow for my bank statements.

. . .

 

Sort of lost of this one, if I should even put them in Evernote, or keep the method I am using. My method is more secure, but I have had sparse bundles die, and with all but one backup system honoring all the Mac's extended attributes on a file, I know for a fact that uploading a sparse bundle or image will nuke it to near all online backup services on the Mac.  Anything with a resource fork or data fork and you are going to hurt your file.

 

Suggestion from anyone who has been down this road?

 

 

Since you are using a Mac, you have some great choices.

 

#1, and most important:  Security

• BEFORE you import to Evernote, encrypt / PW protect all sensitive PDFs.
• Adobe Acrobat does this, including 256-bit encryption.
• If you have a lot of PDFs, there may be utilities to do this in batches

#2 -- Import into Evernote Using the File Creation Date

• Veritrope.com offers a great AppleScript for import into Evernote
• See Evernote Import Folder Using AppleScript from Veritrope.com 
• You can customize this script to set the EN Note Creation Date to the File Creation Date
• I have a customized version of this script that does this and does NOT ask for NBs or Tags.  Let me know if you are interested in this script.

#3 -- EN Organization

• There are number of ways to organize, but, IMO, Tags are probably the best.
• My suggestion, if you use Tags,
  • Keep the Tag names short, and don't use spaces
  • Don't use compound Tags, like "Bank Year".  Use separate tags for "Bank" and "Year".  This gives you more flexibility and reduces the number of tags you will need.
  • You can use a Tag of "Financial" for all of this stuff, or you can use a Notebook of "Financial".  If you use the Tag, you just have to remember to always assign that tag in addition to the others.  For some reason, it is easier for me to remember to use the NB "Financial", and then assign the appropriate tags.
  • I also like to use prefixes with Tags, like "BK" (for bank), so I might have tags of "BK.Chase", "BK.BoA", etc.
    • ​This lets you easily search for all banks by just entering "BK.*"
    • It lets you easily assign tags by just typing "bk." and Evernote shows a dropdown list of all banks 

​I could add more, but I'll stop here.  If you have any questions please feel free to ask.

[GreyGray 15]

Hello JMichael, 

 

Thanks for the info.  I am pretty close in my head to managing them as you said.

 

First issue is one of personal tradeoffs. I want to be able to search, see, read, print, etc my PDF files, if I encrypt, zip, stuff em in a disk image, etc, I may as well not even keep them in EN, and just keep them on my local file system.  I could use a local notebook but in my playing, many statements have made it to the cloud.  I deleted them, deleted everything, and started over, but who knows the EN retention policy.  It just seems I give up so much, but I guess for bank statements, seeing inside them is not important, finding them, then being able to open them is.  Though when I need to know what 56.34 was spend on, I won't be able to easily search that out anymore.  Stuck on this issue.

 

The date issue, I have been thinking about scripting this.  I don't think I can set the title to the File Creation Date which would be when I downloaded it.  Some are a few seconds apart, others are months apart.  I just get an email that says to download my statements.  I may get to it that day, or later in the month, or months from then.  I have a year, thats what they hold as an archive.  They are pre-dated as a filename to the correct closing date of the statement.  It's just every bank uses a different date format, and EN changes those file titles to something else.  I have been considered a bash script or ruby or even php since all support vague date types where I can feed it a filename, and no matter how goofy the date format is, it will convert it to something like a epoch based timestamp which I can then easily convert to something EN does in-fact like to import without modifying.  A simple way would be to find and replace in "/" with a ".", that should keep EN happy on importing.

 

EN dates are sort of a mess.  If I import a file 01/01/15 it will name the note 01.01.15 but if I export the note and open it in a text editor, the markup in the file is using "/" as I imported it.  I wonder how search works, if it searches on the "/" or on the ".".  Either way, it's sort of a mess.  I would file a ticket but have gotten the feeling direct support is not so great at EN.  Though I did buy a month in my testing so perhaps that gives me priority support of some kind.

 

Thanks again, and if you think of anything else, let me know.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

@GreyGray:

 

Using a modified version of the Veritrope AppleScript will allow you to import the PDF to Evernote, and set the EN Note Created Date to the PDF file created date.  If you wish, you could also use the date in setting the Note Title in whatever format you would like, with some changes to the AppleScript.

 

The EN Created Date and Updated (Modification) Date are true date fields.  I don't see the "mess" you referred to.

You can use EN Search to search for a specific date, or a specific year.

 

Security vs Search

 

This is always a personal decision.  Personally, I tend to go with security over searching.  The Note Title can be searched, and you can add text to the Note content to be used as search keywords.  If you want to be able to search for data in the PDF like the transaction description, then you don't have much of a choice but to leave the PDF un-encrypted.  But I think this is risky for sync'd Notebooks stored in the EN Cloud.

 

Perhaps it is too late for your historical bank records, but I use Quicken to download all of the transaction details.  So if I need that level of search I go to quicken.

 

The only safe way I know of to have both is to use Evernote Local Notebooks, and store you un-encrypted sensitive Notes there.

Local Notebooks, by design, exist ONLY on the computer you create them on, and are NEVER sync'd.

Of course, you may still need to deal with someone stealing your computer, but that may be a very unlikely possibility.  Only you can really judge that risk.

 

Hope this helps.

 

 

[GreyGray 15]

Thanks JM,

 

The date issue is that the pdf's date is set in the files metadata.  The creation date is that of when I downloaded it, not the date of the statement.  But the filename has the correct date.  I think it is just a matter of me writing  a script to grab those dates, parse them, and convert them to something EN can understand, as a slash separated date will be altered.

 

I agree, I can always change the subject and fix things up, I am just trying to spend as little time as possible with all these files.  I like to use EN as a way to get things in quick, and then get away from the app.  I actually wish there were ways other than the menu item to add items to EN without opening the app.  I can write AppleScripts but that launches the app, though I was just wondering if I target the app that runs the menulet, if that would insert an item into my inbox without opening the app. One reason I only looked at OneNote for about 10 seconds was the launch time, it is terrible, and I don't want to wait on the app eery time I open it.

 

Thanks for all the other suggestions and hints.  I think I am going with a local notebook so they never get in the cloud.  Which is kind of funny as I will then use an app to send them encrypted to Amazon S3.  I wonder why EN doesn't just do encryption across the board, it would make things a ton easier.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

Thanks JM,

 

The date issue is that the pdf's date is set in the files metadata.  The creation date is that of when I downloaded it, not the date of the statement.  But the filename has the correct date.  I think it is just a matter of me writing  a script to grab those dates, parse them, and convert them to something EN can understand, as a slash separated date will be altered.

 

 

OK, now I have a better understanding of your situation.

 

Using AppleScript, you can:

1. Extract the date from the Filename
2. Use it to set the Note Creation Date (will probably require some manipulation to get into an AppleScript date object)
3. Set the Note Title, and the Attachment Name, replacing the date in the Filename with a different format, like "YYYYMMDD"

Manipulating dates in AppleScript is tricky.  You might do a google on "Applescript dates".

You may also find the following useful:

Satimage AppleScript Additions

[chirmer 567]

Being on a Mac gives you a lot of options. I use Hazel in a setup that lets me simply download all of my statements and bank receipts to my desktop, where Hazel then renames them to my desired note title structure and adds them to Evernote with all of my proper tags and into the correct notebook. I quite literally download the PDF and it does all of the work for me. I'm not at my Mac currently, but if you want more info on my setup just say so and I'll give you a more in-depth answer when I get off work and am at my MacBook.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

@chirmer:  I'd love to see more info on your Hazel script/setup, if you don't mind sharing it.  Sounds like it would be useful to many people.

[GreyGray 15]

Thanks for the suggestion to look at hazel, I will take a look.  I am pretty adept at scripting on the Mac and usually will hobble together a small script to perform the actions I need. If I need something more full time and automated, hazel looks pretty amazing.