Privacy — the plain question
Is it safe to upload a bank statement to an online converter?
A bank statement is one of the most revealing documents you own: who pays you, who you pay, when, how much, and the account it all sits in. Before uploading one to any website, it is worth knowing exactly what you are doing.
What a statement contains
Your name and address. Your account number and sort code. Every payee and every payer for the month, with dates and amounts. Your balance every day. Together, that is enough to build a detailed picture of a person or a business — which is precisely why banks protect statements and why fraudsters want them.
What "upload" means
When a website converts your statement, the file leaves your computer and is processed on the site's servers. From that moment the questions are about them, not you: where the servers are, how long the file is kept, who can see it, whether it is used for anything else, what happens if they are breached, and whether their answers to all of that are written down somewhere you can read. Some services answer these questions well. The point is that you are now trusting their answers, and you cannot check them.
Questions worth asking before you click
- Does the site say, in its privacy policy, how long uploaded files are kept and when they are deleted?
- Is the processing done on their servers, or on your machine in the browser? Both exist; they are very different.
- Who is the company behind the site, and where? Is there a registered address?
- Do you need to give an email address or create an account to get the result — and what is that address then used for?
- Is it a one-off, or are you signing up to a subscription to do one job?
The routes that keep the statement on your computer
You do not have to upload anything to get rows out of a PDF. Your bank's own CSV export (for recent months), copy and paste, Excel's Get Data from PDF on Windows, and free table extractors that run locally all keep the file where it is — see how to convert a PDF bank statement to CSV for how each one behaves. They vary in how much tidying and checking you do afterwards, but none of them hands your banking to a third party.
Being straight with you: we make Ledgavo, a desktop app, so we have a view on this. The view is simply that a statement should not have to leave your machine to become a spreadsheet — and that any tool, ours included, should be judged on what it does with your file, not what it says.
Where Ledgavo fits
Ledgavo runs on your Mac or Windows PC. The statement is read on your computer and the CSV is written where you choose; neither is sent anywhere. Its one outbound call, and you choose when, is the licence-key check when you activate — your statements are never part of that. A statement that needs its password is opened with it and the password is then gone.