How do you reliably convert PDF bank statements to Excel without uploading them?

A PDF statement is made for reading, not for reconciling. Ask the client whether their online banking can download the period's transactions as CSV or Excel. It's usually under the account's transaction history, and it gives you clean columns with no conversion errors.

If the bank only offers PDFs, or the client can't get the export, convert the statement on your own machine rather than uploading a client's bank statement to a converter website.

• Excel for Microsoft 365 on Windows can import tables straight from a PDF file through Get Data. It works best on statements where each transaction sits on one row.
• Tabula, a free, open-source desktop tool, extracts tables from text-based PDFs on your computer and saves them as CSV.
• Scanned statements (pictures of pages, where you can't select the text) need OCR before any table extraction, and OCR misreads digits. Check those line by line.

1. Keep one row per transaction, with date, description and amount, or separate debit and credit columns.
2. Remove page headers, footers, running-balance-only rows and carried-forward lines that repeat on every page.
3. Join descriptions that wrapped onto a second line back into one row.
4. Check the dates came through as dates and the amounts as numbers, with the right sign.
5. Prove it: opening balance plus deposits minus withdrawals must equal the statement's closing balance. If the statement prints totals for deposits and withdrawals, match those too. Don't reconcile from a file that fails this check.

Clearing doesn't read PDF statements. It reconciles CSV or Excel bank and ledger exports on your computer, so a statement you've converted and checked as above can be reconciled in Clearing without uploading it anywhere. Clearing reads the date, reference, description and amount columns (or debit and credit), and supported layouts are detected from the file.

How to choose bank reconciliation software →