Catching up on old months
The bank's CSV export only goes back a few months. The older statements are PDFs.
Online banking is generous with the last few months and silent about the rest. If you are catching up a year of books, or an accountant has asked for twelve months of transactions, the PDFs are usually the only record you still have. This is how to work from them.
Why the export stops where it does
Banks keep statements for years but tend to limit transaction exports — the CSV or spreadsheet download — to a rolling window: commonly the last three months, sometimes twelve. Past that, what you can download is the monthly statement as a PDF, which was designed to be read and printed, not added up.
So the typical catching-up job looks like this: the recent months come out of the export cleanly, and the older months are a folder of PDFs, one per month.
Step one: download every statement you need, now
Before anything else, download all the monthly PDFs for the period and put them in one folder, named so they sort by date (most banks name them by month already). Do this first because access to old statements can itself be limited, and because a folder of PDFs is the input every route below needs.
Step two: get rows out of the PDFs
The routes are the same as for any PDF statement — copy and paste, Excel's Get Data from PDF on Windows, a free table extractor, or a converter — and they are covered in how to convert a PDF bank statement to CSV. For a single old month, copy and paste is fine. For twelve, the by-hand routes are where the time and the mistakes go.
Step three: check across the months, not just within them
Each statement's running balance should reconcile within the month (each balance = previous balance + money in − money out). Across months there is a second check: one month's closing balance should be the next month's opening balance. If you have a gap — a missing statement — this is where it shows.
Being straight with you: if some of your old statements are scans or photos rather than digital PDFs, they need OCR, which is a separate job with its own error rate. Everything here assumes the PDFs your bank produced.
Where Ledgavo fits
This is the job Ledgavo was built for. Point it at the folder, and it reads every statement, runs the running-balance check on each one where the statement carries a running balance, tells you when it could not, and writes a CSV per statement — on your computer, without uploading a year of your banking anywhere. The free trial does one statement per run in full; a licence does whole folders.