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 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.

Explainer

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

SWIFT is retiring MT940 by 2028. What that means for your exports, and how to read both formats today.

Guide

Bank statements for a mortgage application: what lenders actually check

How many months, what format, what raises flags — and how to deliver clean statements without the back-and-forth.

Explainer

OCR for scanned bank statements: why generic tools get the numbers wrong

Decimal commas, merged columns, running balances — where OCR breaks on financial documents and how verification catches it.

How-to

How to categorize bank transactions in Excel (formulas included)

A copy-paste categorization setup: lookup tables, SUMIFS by category, and a monthly dashboard from raw statement rows.

Guide

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

Batch conversion, deduplication across overlapping statements, and the checks to run before handing data to your accountant.

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