Guides & articles

The statement workbench

Practical, no-fluff guides on getting transaction data out of bank statements and into the tools where you actually work.

How-to

How to do a bank reconciliation in Excel (step by step, with formulas)

The matching formula, the four buckets every unmatched item falls into, and the diagnostics that find a stubborn difference in seconds.

Guide

Proof of income when you're self-employed: what your bank statements need to show

No payslips, just statements. How lenders, landlords and consulates read a freelancer's account — and how to make irregular income legible.

How-to

How to convert a credit card statement to Excel (and why the signs matter)

Card balances run backwards, charges and payments invert, and foreign purchases hide their true cost. The conventions that make card statements reconcile.

Guide

Bank statements for a visa application: what consulates actually check

How many months to prepare, why sudden deposits get flagged, and how to read six months of your own statements before an officer does.

Guide

Turning a year of bank statements into one spreadsheet before tax season

Batch conversion, the balance chain that catches a missing month, safe deduplication of overlapping periods, and the checks to run before your accountant sees it.

Explainer

MT940 vs CAMT.053: which statement format should you ask your bank for?

MT940 is deprecated but not gone. What each format carries, how the fields map, and what the 2027–2028 deadlines actually require of you.

How-to

Bank statement PDF to CSV: getting a file your accounting software accepts

The exact column layouts Xero, QuickBooks Online, Wave and FreeAgent expect — and the five format traps behind rejected imports.

How-to

How to categorize bank transactions in Excel (formulas included)

A keyword rules table, one formula that tags every row, SUMIFS by category, and a month-by-month dashboard. Copy-paste ready.

Guide

Bank statements for a mortgage application: what lenders actually check

How many months, what format, what underwriters flag — and how to self-audit your statements before the bank reads them.

Explainer

How to convert scanned bank statements to Excel — and why OCR gets numbers wrong

Scans and photos defeat Excel's PDF import, and generic OCR misreads exactly the digits that matter. The fix is arithmetic, not eyesight.

How-to

How to import a bank statement into QuickBooks (PDF to QBO)

QuickBooks can't read PDFs — convert to a QBO file that imports directly, balance-verified and pre-categorized.

How-to

How to convert a bank statement PDF to Excel (3 methods compared)

Manual retyping, copy-paste from PDF, and automated conversion — what each costs you in time and errors, with a worked example.

Skip the manual work entirely

20 free statement pages every month. No credit card required.

Convert a statement free