How do you change in postfinance the type of documents they deliver? I’d like to have both pdf and any text based format but I didn’t find the way to do it. Also I think I’ve read elsewhere that you can’t have two formats at the same time. 
Would be nice to know. I’m having serious issues converting all data from different providers to Beancount. PostFinance is not that tragic. In Cockpit you have this old GUI, where you can look for transactions in the last 5 years. Then click down to expand all and then can copy paste the whole table into Excel.
Much worse pain was with UBS, where I only had PDF documents for each month. And PDF is such a retarded format… The amount “1 000.00 CHF” will put the “1” and the “000” in a completely difference place when you copy paste the whole document. It was a real challenge to extract it all.
And then, Cumulus, anybody cracked that? I see they only provide statements for the last year 
and all in PDF 
. I remember when I closed the account in Poland I just just exported all my transactions with all details for the last 5 years to CSV and the feature was there since 2005… Modern e-banking GUI, eh?
For Cumulus the only option is to convert the pdf but with tabula it works quite well. UBS you can extract anything in csv from e-banking and choose the time frame.
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I closed UBS account long ago, PDFs were the only thing left. I will check out tabula, thanks! But any way to get older account statements than 12 months? I really don’t get these institutions. A statement PDF is 250 KB, with 400’000 clients that’s 100 GB for one month of statements. Not really a lot. And at the same time Google holds many GB of your silly photos for free.
Edit: Tabula works really well with Cumulus PDFs!
you can download any transaction up to (i dont remember, > 12 month) back in csv on the standard account activity page, see
Beancount getting started
the export button features .csv format. I dont have my PF Excel importer workaround for beancount at hand, but the one for IB is very similar:
Beancount advancement Thread
pity. I remember having tried a xml from PF a while ago (10+ years ago)
Don’t get me started on these modern GUI’s! 
Fancy-lookin’ buttons and big font size. I understand they try to make it iPad-or-even-iPhone-conform, but they are dumbing it down for the rest of us, who actually found a simple table much more useful / better overview. At work it’s the same, old schooling systems with a good old list of what’s available or to-do replaced by an app with no overview and a very lousy search function.
So far that seems to be the situation yes, I’ve asked for the XML statements and I can’t receive the PDF ones anymore.
there are also those camt.054 documents that businesses use to process their banking with some third-party software. you can also order them as a private person, just contact the support (at least postfinance). however this seems to block other forms of statements, i am not so sure about it. make sure they explain you everything. i didnt’d do that, i am happy to download the .csv once in a while.
ssh-automated access & download would be nice, of course.
I think the XML ones I’m getting is using the camt format.