Convert a Scanned Bank Statement
A statement that was scanned, faxed or photographed has no text in it, only a picture of text, which is why most converters return an empty file. This one renders those pages and reads them properly, and gives you the transactions as Excel or CSV. Only pages with no text in them are read this way; the PDF file itself is never uploaded.
Only scanned pages are sent to be read · the PDF file never is
How a scan is read
Drop the PDF in as normal; there is no separate scanned mode to choose
Each page is checked for a text layer, and only the pages without one go to OCR
Those pages are rendered on your device at twice their size, and the image is sent to be read
The rows come out as transactions, with the running balance recomputed so a misread line shows up
What that means in practice
- Page by page, not all or nothing: a statement where only the middle pages were scanned uses OCR on those and the fast path on the rest.
- Only the scanned pages are sent as whole pages. A digital statement sends no page image, and most statements are digital.
- Pages are rendered at twice their nominal size before reading, which is what makes small print and thin bank fonts legible.
- The balance check runs on the result, so a figure OCR read wrong usually breaks the running balance instead of passing silently.
- The PDF file is never uploaded. For a scanned page the rendered image is sent to be read, which is the one thing on this site that leaves your device as a picture, and our privacy policy says so plainly.
Why a scan is harder than a PDF from the bank
A statement downloaded from online banking contains the text itself, so reading it is a matter of putting the fragments back in the right order. A scan contains pixels. The numbers have to be recognised from their shapes, and a 3 that has been photographed at an angle under a desk lamp is genuinely ambiguous. Expect to check a scanned result in a way you would not check a digital one.
That is why the balance reconciliation matters more here than anywhere else. Opening balance, plus the credits, minus the debits, should land exactly on the closing balance, and when OCR misreads a digit it usually does not. A mismatch tells you which statement needs a second look, and roughly how large the error is.
Scanned statement questions
Do I have to tell it the file is scanned?
No. Every page is checked for a usable text layer and only the pages without one are sent to OCR, so a mixed file with some scanned pages and some digital ones is handled correctly without you sorting it out first.
Is the scan sent anywhere to be read?
The PDF file is never uploaded. For a page with no text in it, we render that page on your device and send the image to be read, because reading it in the browser instead was measurably worse: on our corpus of scanned statements it got half as many to balance, and returned nothing at all for several. Only pages with no text layer are sent whole, so a statement downloaded from your bank sends no page image. Our privacy policy sets out what happens to it.
Will a phone photograph work?
Often, and it depends mostly on the photograph. Flat, evenly lit and square to the page reads well. A photo taken at an angle, in shadow, or with the page curved will lose characters. If you have the choice, a flatbed scan or a scanner app that flattens the page is worth the extra minute.
How accurate is it?
Good enough to save the typing, not good enough to trust unread. Treat the output as a draft you check, and start with the balance reconciliation: if the opening balance plus the transactions lands on the closing balance, the amounts are almost certainly right. If it does not, the gap points at what was misread.
Why is a scanned statement slower to convert?
Because recognising characters from an image is far more work than reading text that is already there. Each page is rendered on your device and sent to be read, three at a time, so a long scan takes a little while. A digital statement of the same length is close to instant.
What if my statement is a photo rather than a PDF?
Put the images into a PDF first, which every phone scanner app and both macOS Preview and Windows Photos will do. The converter takes a PDF, and one PDF containing all the pages is also how you get a single spreadsheet out rather than one per page.
Convert a scanned statement
Excel and CSV are free, and the balance check runs on the result so you can see straight away whether the scan read cleanly.
Guides for this workflow
- Guide6 min read
How to Spot a Fake or Edited Bank Statement
Lenders, landlords and law firms are handed doctored statements routinely. The five checks that catch most of them: balances that no longer add up, rows that repeat, amounts that are too round, the software that made the PDF, and a modification date.
- Engineering10 min read
The Running Balance Is a Free Oracle for a Bank Statement Parser
Parsing a bank statement is easy. Knowing you parsed it wrong is the hard part, and there is no test set to tell you. Every statement ships with its own answer key, and this is what we learned building a parser around it, including the two places it is blind.
- Engineering7 min read
A PDF’s Text Layer Has the Right Numbers in the Wrong Order
Reading a bank statement from its PDF text is exact about figures and unreliable about order. What we do with the pages that fail: draw them, read the picture, and let the text layer veto every digit. Plus the two bugs that taught us where the check was blind.