Bank statements in Excel
PDF bank statement to Excel: every route, free first
You don't need a converter to get a bank statement into Excel; you need the rows in the right columns and the confidence that none of them are wrong. Here is how to get both.
The shortcut most people miss
If your bank's online banking can export the period you need as CSV, download that and open it in Excel. Done. Excel opens CSV directly, and the figures come from the bank's own records. The only reason to work from the PDF is that the export doesn't cover the months you need — which is common for anything older than a year.
Working from the PDF
Get Data from PDF (Excel for Windows)
Data → Get Data → From File → From PDF, then pick the table from the navigator. This is the best free route on Windows. Two things to watch: statements that run over several pages usually arrive as one table per page, which you will need to stack; and a description that wraps onto a second line on the statement tends to become a row of its own, with empty amount cells. Delete or merge those before you add anything up.
Copy and paste
Select the table in your PDF viewer, copy, and paste into a sheet. If everything lands in column A, use Data → Text to Columns with a space or tab delimiter, then fix the descriptions (which contain spaces and will have been split). It works for a short statement; for a year of them it is where mistakes creep in.
A CSV from a converter
Any tool that turns the PDF into CSV hands Excel a clean file. What matters is whether the tool knows which column is money in, which is money out and which is the balance — and whether it checked. See how to convert a PDF bank statement to CSV for the routes and their failure modes.
Make Excel check the statement for you
Once the rows are in, add one column. If your balance is in column F, money in is D and money out is E, then in the second data row put =F2+D3-E3 and fill down. It should reproduce column F exactly. Where it doesn't, that row — or the one above it — is wrong. Then sum D and E and compare with the statement's printed totals for the period. This is the check bookkeepers do by eye; Excel does it in a second.
Being straight with you: if your statement is a scan or a photo, none of these routes see any text — that needs OCR, and OCR of numbers is exactly where errors hide. Everything here is for digital PDFs, the kind your bank produces.
Where Ledgavo fits
Ledgavo produces the CSV with the columns already sorted — date, description, money in, money out, balance, in the statement's own order — and has already run that running-balance check on every row, where the statement carries a running balance, before it lets you save. Open the CSV in Excel and you are looking at rows that added up. It runs on your own computer; nothing is uploaded.