Bank Statement Converter API: Automating Financial Data Extraction
Converting statements one at a time in a browser is right for individuals and small practices. If statements arrive as a stream, loan applications, client onboarding, expense audits, you want the same parsing as an API call inside your own pipeline.
The PivotBank API takes a statement PDF and returns structured JSON: every transaction with date, description, amount and balance, plus detected bank, account and statement period metadata.
What the API returns
One POST with the PDF gets you a JSON document containing:
- Transactions: date, description, amount (signed), balance, and category for each line
- Metadata: detected bank, account number (masked), statement period and currency
- Verification: a balance-check result telling you whether the parsed lines reconcile from opening to closing balance
- Summary: totals in and out, transaction count, and recurring payments detected
Why the verification field matters
Most statement-parsing APIs give you transactions and leave data quality as your problem. The balance reconciliation in every PivotBank response is machine-checkable ground truth: if verified is true, the transaction list provably chains from the opening balance to the closing balance. Route verified statements straight through your pipeline, and only queue the rare failures for human review. That single field is the difference between an automation you trust and one you audit by hand.
Integration patterns
Three patterns cover most production uses:
- Lending: applicant uploads statements, the API returns categorised income and outgoings for affordability checks in seconds
- Accounting platforms: accept statement PDFs from users and feed clean transactions into your ledger model without building a PDF parser
- Internal finance ops: watch a mailbox or drive folder, convert arriving statements automatically and land them in your warehouse
Getting started
API keys are generated from your PivotBank account. Send the PDF as multipart form data to the convert endpoint and you get JSON back; typical statements process in a few seconds. See the API access page for endpoint details, rate limits and pricing, and start with the free tier to test against your own statement formats.