Your accountant wants last year's transactions in Excel. Your bank only gives them as PDFs. Three hundred lines, twelve months, and "can you have it by Thursday."
This is the classic PDF-to-Excel job — and exactly what these converters were built for.
Most statements convert cleanly
Bank statements have predictable structure: a date column, a description, a debit, a credit, a running balance. Converters know what to expect and detect the table almost every time. Flint's PDF to Excel handles statements from major UK and US banks out of the box — HSBC, Lloyds, Chase, Wells Fargo, Monzo, Starling, Revolut.
Numbers come across numeric, ready for SUM and AutoFilter.
The dates column needs attention
Some banks use dd/mm/yyyy, some mm/dd/yyyy, some "5 Mar" with the year only in the header. Excel may not recognise everything as a date. After conversion, select the date column, Data > Text to Columns > Date, and pick the right format. Two seconds, removes a lot of pain.
Handle multi-page statements
Statements often run 4–10 pages. The converter stitches the table back together across page breaks (as long as the column headers repeat). If your statement has marketing pages or a glossary tucked in, split the PDF to extract only the transaction pages first — cleaner result, less manual deletion afterwards.
Reconciliation tips
After conversion, add columns for category and account if you're feeding into accounting software. Sort by date to spot duplicates. Use SUMIF to total by category — fastest sanity check that nothing went sideways during conversion. If amounts don't tie to the statement total, look for OCR errors on scanned statements (1 vs 7, 0 vs 8 are classic).
FAQ
Will it work on scanned statements?
Yes — OCR runs automatically. Accuracy on scanned statements is typically 95–99% but numbers should always be cross-checked against the statement total.
Are statement balances preserved?
Yes — the running balance column converts the same way as debits and credits. Use it as a verification column.
What if my bank uses an unusual layout?
Most banks fall within the converter's known templates. If yours doesn't, the result may need a tidy-up pass — usually nothing more than splitting one column into two.
Can I feed this into QuickBooks or Xero?
Yes — most accounting software accepts CSV. Export the cleaned-up Excel as CSV and import. Convert PDF to CSV directly if you want to skip Excel entirely.
Statements were made for this. Convert your bank statement to Excel and get to the reconciling.