Import MBNA business credit card statement

• Tim Fouracre
• Wednesday, 11 February 2009
• Bank Import Tool Update

Card review

We’ve tested out importing transactions from a few different business credit cards here at Clear Books, and our current favourite has to be the MBNA business card.

Not only does this card come with really easy to use online banking and a decent export facility, it also pays 0.5% cash back. However, if you want to get the cashback there is a £29 annual fee per card, so it’s only worth doing if you spend more than an average of £5800 a year per card holder. If this isn’t the case then you can just go for the free card that doesn’t pay cashback.

For

• You can download each card statement as a separate file, which prevents duplicates. Some other banks force you to specify a date range each time you want to export data.
• It pays 0.5% cash back.
• The online banking is very easy to use.

Against

• Statement downloads aren’t instant. You have to wait a few minutes for the files to generate.

Import transactions

So how does the import process work?

Visit their secure online banking site and enter your details. If you haven’t already got an online account up you will need to follow the sign up links. 

Once you’ve logged in you will be presented with the main control panel. In the middle of the screen you should see a drop down box which says Select Period to View. You should always download a statement for a whole month, rather than the current transactions – this will stop problems with duplicate transactions.

So click on the drop down, and pick the statement you wish to view.

I’m going to download my statement for January which was produced on the 2nd of February. To do this you must select the file format that you wish to use, from the box below the Transaction Summary section.

I’ve selected .qif as this is our preferred format for MBNA. Once you’ve selected this from the drop down box, click Go. You should then be presented with a message, saying that the download is pending.

On the left hand menu, you should see a link to Download Files Inbox - click this.

Then you will need to wait a few minutes while the download is being generated (this is the only real downside with MBNA – a lot of other banks will generate the file instantly for you). You may need to refresh this page a few times by clicking reload, or by clicking on the link again. Once the file is ready it should look something like this:

So finally, you just need to click the link beneath Statement Period, and then should cause the file to be downloaded to your computer. We recommend you save this file to a folder somewhere along with all your other downloads, in case you ever need to access them again.

On my computer, for some reason the file get’s appended with an additional .txt extension. Clear Books expects the file to be .qif, so you have to remove the .txt from the file name. I actually rename the whole file to something more logical, so that nge97747.qif becomes mbna-paul-2009-02-02.qif

From here you can follow the rest of our instructions for a standard bank import.

Good luck!