Convert PDF bank statements to Excel

What’s in the workbook

• Transactions sheet: date, description, money out, money in, a signed amount, the running balance, the page it came from, line references and any review flags.
• Summary sheet: bank, last four digits of the account, currency, statement period, opening and closing balances, total money in and out, and whether the statement balanced.
• Dates are stored as Excel dates and amounts as numbers with two decimal places, so SUM, filters and pivot tables work straight away. Descriptions are stored as text, exactly as printed.
• The header row is frozen and filtered on both sheets.

How to convert a PDF bank statement to Excel

1. 1Upload the PDF statements, up to 10 at a time and up to 50 pages each. If a file is password-protected you’ll be asked for the password; it’s used once and never stored.
2. 2Review each statement next to its transactions. The opening balance, every transaction and the closing balance have to add up; if they don’t, the rows to check are flagged.
3. 3Correct any flagged date, description or amount and watch the totals update as you type.
4. 4Choose Export, then Excel workbook (.xlsx). Dates show as DD/MM/YYYY unless you pick MM/DD/YYYY or YYYY-MM-DD.

Checked before it reaches the books

A dropped row or a misread minus sign doesn’t show up when you import a file. It shows up weeks later, when the account won’t reconcile. So before you export, the converter checks that the opening balance plus every transaction equals the closing balance printed on the statement, and flags the rows to look at when it doesn’t.

Every row is linked to the line on the PDF it came from, so you can click a transaction and see the original. On text PDFs, amounts are taken from the statement itself rather than retyped. Scanned pages can be converted too, but can’t be traced line by line.

Excel or CSV?

Choose the workbook when you’ll work in a spreadsheet: it keeps dates and numbers typed and includes the summary sheet. Choose CSV when another program will read the file, or one of the Xero and QuickBooks layouts when you’re importing into those.