Turn a bank statement into a spreadsheet

Most converters hand you a spreadsheet and leave you to trust it. A wrong number that looks right is worse than no number at all, because you will not go looking for it. So where your statement prints a running balance, this page adds up every transaction it read and compares the result against that balance. If the two agree to the cent, it says so. If they do not, it says that instead — and tells you how many rows disagree, so you know exactly what to check.

There is no list of banks in this page and no template to match. It finds the row of column headings your bank printed and works out where each column sits on the page, then reads every row against those positions. That is why a statement from a bank nobody has tested still works: a statement that labels its columns is telling you where they are. It handles split debit and credit columns where the sign is never printed, descriptions that wrap onto a second line, dates that appear once per day and are inherited by the rows beneath, and amounts whose minus sign is printed after the number.

A statement downloaded from online banking contains real text. A statement you photographed or scanned contains a picture of a page, with no text in it at all — reading that needs character recognition, which this page does not do. Rather than hand you an empty or invented spreadsheet, it tells you plainly that the file is a scan.

A bank statement is close to the most sensitive document most people own: every place you shop, every person you pay, your balance on any given day. It is exactly the file worth not sending to a stranger's server. This page has no server to send it to — your browser opens the PDF and does the work. Here is how that is enforced.