How to turn a bank statement PDF into a spreadsheet

A bank statement arrives as a PDF because the bank wants it to look the same everywhere, not because the numbers inside are organised. Copying the page into a spreadsheet gives you one long column of text, because a PDF stores where each piece of text sits on the page and nothing about which column it belonged to. The columns have to be worked out again from the positions.

That is what Bank Statement to Excel does: it reads the dated rows and separates debit, credit and balance into real columns you can sort and total. It is one of the Pro tools, so it needs an active plan.

Most Indian bank statements arrive password protected, and the password is usually built from your own details: a date of birth, part of your name, or the last digits of the account number, depending on the bank. The email that carried the statement normally says which. The file has to be opened before anything can read it, so unlock it first if the tool asks.

Statements differ more than they look. SBI, HDFC and ICICI each lay out the narration column differently and put the running balance in a different place, and a statement that was scanned rather than downloaded is a picture of a table rather than a table. A scan has to go through OCR before any of this works. Whichever bank it came from, check the first and last rows of the result against the PDF before you rely on the totals.