Monday, April 15, 2013

Search Mint.com Transactions by Date with Firefox or Chrome

 If you're a Mint.com user, you've probably noticed that the search interface isn't all that great.  For one thing, you can't search your transactions by date.  When tax season rolls around, it is absolutely necessary to search and display only the transactions from the previous year.

It seems I'm not the only one to have noticed this oversight.  Look at the discussion on the Mint.com help blog here.  At that time (2009!) Mint representative Matt Snider posted the following response:



You can, but currently only by modifying the URL directly. We intend to someday expose this functionality in the user interface, but have not been able to agree on a minty enough design. Anyway, go to the transaction page, and you should see "https://wwws.mint.com/transaction.event" in the URL. Add the following "?startDate=06/01/2009&endDate=06/30/2009" at the end of the URL and hit enter. Change the start and end date to the dates you want to search. The complete URL should look something like this:

https://wwws.mint.com/transaction.eve...

Here Mint admits that they've been unable to come up with a "Minty enough" design in four years time!  In addition, this post reveals a semi-official interface to do this filtering yourself.  With this information, at least we are somewhat equipped to fix this problem ourselves.
  • If you use the Chrome browser, check out this extension in the Chrome Web Store.  I'm not a Chrome user so I can't comment more on this solution but it looks pretty sweet.
  • If you use Firefox, you can use my Greasemonkey script.
The basic interface.  Both dates are OK, so they're colored mint green.
Prerequisites:
Using the script:
  • Load the "Transactions" view on Mint.com.
  • Two input fields will appear below the search box. 
  • Set the start date and end date.  
  • If both dates are valid dates the page should reload automatically click the "Go" button.
  • If either of the dates are invalid the invalid date will be marked as pink.
  • You can get pretty crazy with the input date.  Try "Jan 1 2013" or "12-Jan-13" or whatever you want.  This functionality comes from the awesome datejs library.  Read more about that here.
  • It is possible that you get into a situation where the dates aren't updating, in this case you may need to start from "Transactions" again.
Here are some more clips of what the interface looks like:

Hover over either date to get more information.  Note "yesterday" works fine.

...just using a different entry format.


Here is an invalid entry.

It isn't perfect, but better than nothing!  Check out the source at github, change it, and push it back to me!




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