ASB Gateway conversion

Banking Software to OFX.

We had a request from a customer to extract data from a restored old banking software package. The customer’s small business accounting software had melted down, and some of their backups weren’t the best. The inland revenue service (tax department) was pressuring them with penalties to complete accounts. They needed to re-key two years of bank transaction data. They did at least have backups of their banking software (ASB Bank “Gateway”). This software was supplied by the bank, and linked to their system and downloaded account statements. The package had been discontinued, as the bank had moved to an online access method. Being banking software, it was covered in passwords and security mechanisms. It had always been very reliable software, and had been in service for many years. As a further complicating factor, the customer had over 30 passwords, and could not remember which one applied to the banking package, which expired passwords regularly. The bank software helpdesk was understandably reluctant to give out any information on hacking into their package!

We took a look at the data, and found it used Raima Data Manager, as it contained in the headers “Raima Data Manager Version 3.21A”. We had not heard of this package. A Google search revealed that ITTIA had an ODBC driver for it.

As this was likely to be a one-off exercise, we did not want to commit to large expenditure or development. ITTIA has discontinued offering evaluation versions of it’s driver precisely because it is often used to migrate one-off data from older systems to new systems. Developers were getting the benefit of the driver without having to pay for it. The RDM format is very robust and fairly complex encoded multi file format, so it would not have been easy to adapt any other data reader. We filled in the enquiry form on the ITTIA web site. Sasan Montaseri from the ITTIA team rang long distance in person very promptly, and we explained the situation. He was very understanding, and came to the party with a 7 day version of the driver at a very reasonable price. His dispatch department shipped it out promptly. It comes as a single 1Mb exe setup and long security key, which installed first time. Configuration was straightforward with just two parameters, the DSN name and directory containing the DBD file.

We were delighted to find that it connected to the data first time, and showed all 30 tables and fields perfectly. We were quickly able to pull the data into Excel. The driver was very fast, and data was clean and complete with field names. From there we built some scripts in PumperNickel to grab the data and create OFX (Open Financial Exchange) format, suitable for Microsoft Money and Intuit Quicken packages, but in this case MYOB (Mind Your Own Business), a popular package in New Zealand. The customer has been able to load each month’s statement and get on with their overdue accounts.

So although not a common request, someone searching for this type of conversion in the future will know we have skills and technology to get the job done. Without the ITTIA ODBC driver, it would not have been economic to proceed with a data file based reinstatement of this data.