Bank statement PDF to CSV
CSV is the format that survives every tool you will put it through — but a badly written CSV is worse than no CSV at all. Commas inside merchant names, currency symbols, and the wrong character encoding are the three usual culprits.
What a correct statement CSV needs
Three things separate a CSV that imports cleanly from one that needs an hour of repair:
- Fields containing a comma or a quote are wrapped in quotes, with inner quotes doubled.
- The file is written as UTF-8 with a byte order mark, so Excel on Windows does not turn accented merchant names into mojibake.
- Amounts carry a sign rather than a separate debit and credit column, so a single SUM is correct.
CSV or Excel — which one do you actually want
Take CSV when the file is going into another system: an accounting import, a database loader, a script. Take .xlsx when a person is going to read it, because the numbers arrive pre-formatted and the columns are already sized.
The leading-zero trap
If a statement reference begins with a zero, Excel will strip it when the CSV is opened by double-clicking. Import through Data then From Text/CSV instead, and set that column to text — that keeps the reference intact. The exported file itself is correct; the loss happens on Excel's side during a naive open.
Questions
What column order does the CSV use?
Date, Description, Amount, Balance. That is the order most accounting imports expect, and it means the file usually needs no reordering before import.
Are the dates locale-dependent?
No. Dates are written as YYYY-MM-DD, which is unambiguous and sorts correctly as text as well as a date.
Can I open it in Google Sheets?
Yes — File, Import, Upload, and the delimiter and encoding are detected automatically. The sign convention and date format carry through unchanged.
Other formats
Try it on your own statement
No account, no card, no email. Convert one file and check the rows against the original.
Open the converter