Bankwest Transaction account [General Discussion]

[Rick93]

First two attempts failed, then I found it would allow a $5. payment to OZ LOTTO ( but I doubt I will get any QFF points )

 

[fersea]

If someone is able to PM me with idiot proof macro instructions for telstra accounts, it would be much appreciated!

I would appreciate the same thing.

 

[danwell]

I'm struggling with this too. Are you making the payment through the generic "Pay a Bill" page, or through your "My Account" page? I've tried both and I'm just getting an error each time.

Can someone who has managed to get this work copy the text of the macro, remove their CC details and URL, and post it up here so we can just copy it and enter our own in?

 

[N860CR]

I'm getting the error with both

 

[gizzard]

I'm struggling with this too. Are you making the payment through the generic "Pay a Bill" page, or through your "My Account" page? I've tried both and I'm just getting an error each time.

This may well help you. I have found this when using the Pay a Bill option. It may well work with My Account too but I haven't tried.

Go through the process of making your first payment manually, not using iMacro.
When you get the "Thank you" page indicating that the payment has been accepted then you should stay on the page and start a macro.

All the macro needs to do is "Refresh" (=F5) that page. You can put in a "wait" to ensure the Refresh is complete and then loop to the next Refresh. Do this 49 times and you have your 50 transactions for the day. Each transaction will then only take a few seconds.

 

[danwell]

Oh wow... I can't believe it's that easy and I didn't realise. I'd been trying to get the macro to complete the who payment cycle, with the confirmation button presses and all. A simple refresh on that payment screen makes this much easier. Thanks for spelling it out!

I had another question about the 50 transaction limit, and I'm not at home or I'd check the literature they sent out. Is this something that Bankwest imposes? Is it 50 points eligible transactions in a day (and after the first 50 there are no more points), or fifty transactions in total (i.e., your card won't work after 50 transactions)?
If it's not a Bankwest thing and it's a Telstra limit, and reason we couldn't make 50 transactions through Telstra, then 50 for electricity, gas, rego, insurance, single grapes etc?

 

[Cynicor]

It's a card limit. 50 transactions per card, total, per day. If you can get more cards then you can do more transactions. Have a bit of a read of the thread for ideas on how to do this.

 

[N860CR]

Has anyone found anything other than Telstra that works consistently? Just canned my Telstra account today

 

[hossein_au]

It does work consistently for almost everything I've tried. The problem is the minimum payment limit; for example my elec/gas company has a minimum payment of $5, which defeats the purpose.

 

[N860CR]

Sorry that's what I mean. Something that will happily take $0.01 transactions.

 

[ETA_2022]

All the macro needs to do is "Refresh" (=F5) that page. ... Each transaction will then only take a few seconds.

My experience is each refresh takes up to a minute to complete - with transferring data from infos.telstra.com taking up to 35 seconds and connecting to www.google-analytics.com taking about 20 seconds each time. Also seems to get an error after 15 transactions and at other times such as when I go to another browser window.

I'd love it if I could set it to do 49 transactions and it did them!

Any solutions or hints

 

[Rick93]

I've been 'playing' with my cards - 'manually' ...

I've found:

Coles is better than Woolworths ( Coles self-service check-outs have a faster system, and with less options to press )
You can continue onto your second '50' transactions on a Coles machine ( if you are using a second card ), and continue to split the same tranasaction. However, today, I 'crashed' a machine at 99 transactions. Thus, I would recommended, that you only do 50 at a time, and use each card for a separate 50 tranastctions.

Keeping in mind also, that if you have 'other' uses for your BW card, such as having any Direct Debits taken out, that reduces your 50 transactions per day.

I've found, that once a Coles or Woolworths machine 'crashes', it causes a 'scene' - the attendant starts asking questions; other people stop and stare, and it slows the whole process down.

My advice is now - don't go for '50' .... settle for 48 or 49 on each card.

Taking it to the '50' increases the risk of the machine crashing.

I also noted today, the 'rounding' process for Coles ...

I bought milk @ $3.00

Two cards. 50 transactions each card, @$0.03 each transaction. At $2.97, the machine 'rounded' it off, and I got the last $0.03 for FREE.

Gee, I was happy with myself today !! ( lol )

 

[hossein_au]

My experience is each refresh takes up to a minute to complete - with transferring data from infos.telstra.com taking up to 35 seconds and connecting to Google Analytics Official Website ? Web Analytics & Reporting taking about 20 seconds each time. Also seems to get an error after 15 transactions and at other times such as when I go to another browser window.

I'd love it if I could set it to do 49 transactions and it did them!

Any solutions or hints

Put a delay at the end of the script (say 90 seconds):
WAIT SECONDS=90

Or use this at the top of the macro to extend the builtin timeout (before it gives up and proceeds to the next command in the macro):
SET !TIMEOUT_STEP 120


You can also disable stop on error by using this at top of the macro:
SET !ERRORIGNORE YES

 

[Rick93]

.... and other thing !

The '50' transactions per day on these BW cards ...

I managed to do about 75 the other day ( on a Coles machine ).

If you see a 'Cards Only' machine, these are the fastest to use, and it let me do well over the '50' I expected.

Only reason I stopped at about 75, was I thought 'something was wrong', and I thought I'd check out the receipt to see what was really happening. They all went through ( on the receipt ). Just waiting for BW to finalise payment ( as this was over the weekend ).

 

[ETA_2022]

Put a delay at the end of the script (say 90 seconds):
WAIT SECONDS=90

Or use this at the top of the macro to extend the builtin timeout (before it gives up and proceeds to the next command in the macro):
SET !TIMEOUT_STEP 120

You can also disable stop on error by using this at top of the macro:
SET !ERRORIGNORE YES

Thanks for the Timeout and Ignore Error commands - they will be handy.

I was actually hoping there was something I could do to get the payment confirmation page to finish loading more quickly.

Perhaps I have a setting wrong, but when I run a macro, it waits until the page finishes loading before moving on to the next step, so with long loading times for the payment confirmation page it was hitting the timeout and failing with an error, despite the fact that I had a 15 second wait command at the end. I changed the global timeout from 60 to 80 seconds and that fixed that problem.

It does not start running a wait command until it finishes loading the payment confirmation page, so if I added a 90 seconds wait it would take 2 and a half minutes to complete each transaction.

Is there a way to tell it not to wait more than, say 10 seconds, before doing the next step?

 

[ETA_2022]

Oh wow... I can't believe it's that easy and I didn't realise. I'd been trying to get the macro to complete the who payment cycle, with the confirmation button presses and all. A simple refresh on that payment screen makes this much easier. Thanks for spelling it out!

I tried doing the whole payment using one macro - it didn't work. I then tried the refresh method and that worked.

So now I use a macro to populate the data and manually confirm the payment, before using a second macro, that refreshes the payment confirmation page 49 times (though it's never done more than 17 loops before Telstra's error page shows).

Using two cards each day and with regular errors I'm grateful I don't have to manually enter the card and account info each time.

 

[gizzard]

Two cards. 50 transactions each card, @$0.03 each transaction. At $2.97, the machine 'rounded' it off, and I got the last $0.03 for FREE.

That cracked me up!
I think you mean the last $0.02 for free. I have been doing this for a while now, getting the machines to round off the last 2 cents in my favour. However, about a month ago Coles changed their software and this crashed the machine to such an extent that it no longer worked and they were going to have to reboot it. I haven't used them for a while now but hopefully they have fixed that problem. I know that 2 cents is pretty pathetic but it's more the principle of giving Coles money you don't need to rather than the saving itself.

Thanks for the tip on the "card only" machines, I'll try that out.

Btw, you can do the same with Woolies on the last 2 cents but you have to feed it with a coin of some sort which it then returns to you.

 

[gizzard]

Is there a way to tell it not to wait more than, say 10 seconds, before doing the next step?

I'm using vba which links with Internet Explorer and then I use the refresh final page method. I normally get all 50 transactions through in one go or with one stop and using a wait of just 4 seconds.

 

[Cynicor]

Can I have a picture of a receipt that has had 75+ transactions on it?

These threads are pure class. I don't do the macros etc but I love seeing what everyone else does to get points.

 

[ETA_2022]

Each transaction will then only take a few seconds.

I assumed you meant it only took a few seconds to finish loading the page.

I'm using vba which links with Internet Explorer and then I use the refresh final page method. I normally get all 50 transactions through in one go or with one stop and using a wait of just 4 seconds.

My problem is that the a refresh of the final page is taking about a minute to complete and the macro won't start the next step until the page has finished loading. I've no idea why transferring data from infos.telstra.com is taking up to 35 seconds (download speed is 13Mbps), but the 20 or so seconds trying to connect to www.google-analytics.com might be because my hosts file is directing this request to 0.0.0.0.

I might have found a solution (thanks to hossein_au) using SET !ERRORIGNORE YES with SET !TIMEOUT_PAGE 10 to start the next step after the page has had 10 seconds to load. This assumes that the data from infos.telstra.com and the connection to www.google-analytics.com are unnecessary for a successful payment. I haven't had a chance to test that it doesn't cause any problems yet.