# ANN: gocardless-to-csv : pull all your (European) bank statements as CSV

**URL:** <https://forum.plaintextaccounting.org/t/ann-gocardless-to-csv-pull-all-your-european-bank-statements-as-csv/481>\
**Category:** News\
**Tags:** hledger, ledger\
**Created:** [January 29, 2025, 6:52pm UTC](https://forum.plaintextaccounting.org/t/ann-gocardless-to-csv-pull-all-your-european-bank-statements-as-csv/481 "2025-01-29T18:52:18Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![adept](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex003/user_avatar/forum.plaintextaccounting.org/adept/32/36_2.png) [@adept](https://forum.plaintextaccounting.org/u/adept)\
**Post date:** [January 29, 2025, 6:52pm UTC](https://forum.plaintextaccounting.org/t/ann-gocardless-to-csv-pull-all-your-european-bank-statements-as-csv/481/1 "2025-01-29T18:52:18Z")

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I've recently discovered that GoCardless allows you to use their Bank Data API for free as an individual user, and it supports access to transaction data from 2600+ European banks and financial institutions.

I've tried to write a client that would allow me to pull transaction statements through GoCardless, and [GitHub - adept/gocardless-to-csv: Plain text accounting tool to fetch transactions from GoCardless, save them as JSON, convert them to CSV](https://github.com/adept/gocardless-to-csv) was born.

Now, it is not all smooth sailing. There is an obvious security concern: are you ok with GoCardless having access to your transactions, given that you don't pay them money and they owe you nothing? Besides that, I found that many banks only give access to the last 90 days of transactions, so it would not be possible to migrate a whole history of an old account, should you want that kind of thing.

I'm still trying GoCardless out, and so the tool is not extensively battle-tested, but it is working for me so far. There is a "sandbox" bank (provided by GoCardless) that you connect to, if you want to just give it a try, and dont want to connect your real bank.

Any feedback/bug reports/PRs are appreciated 🙂

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**Author:** ![shlewislee](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ed655f/32.png) [@shlewislee](https://forum.plaintextaccounting.org/u/shlewislee)\
**Post date:** [January 30, 2025, 12:11pm UTC](https://forum.plaintextaccounting.org/t/ann-gocardless-to-csv-pull-all-your-european-bank-statements-as-csv/481/2 "2025-01-30T12:11:48Z")

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This is very impressive. I wish banks would just natively support API(but then again, what a nightmare for both them and us would that be).
