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. Every response here carries a reconciliation object alongside them: verified is true only when the opening balance plus every credit minus every debit lands exactly on the closing balance, and when it is false the object carries the difference, so an integration can quarantine the statement instead of writing a wrong figure into a ledger. It is the one check a caller cannot run for itself without reimplementing the parse.
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, which needs an active Pro subscription: the API is a Pro feature and the endpoint refuses a key belonging to any other 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, limits and pricing.