How to Convert Bank Statements to CSV (Without Losing Data Accuracy)

Short summary

Converting bank statement PDFs to CSV is error-prone due to merged cells, multi-line transactions, inconsistent debit/credit columns, and running balance drift. The article covers three approaches: manual copy-paste (slow and error-prone), pdfplumber scripting (works for clean text-layer PDFs but breaks on scanned documents), and AI-powered OCR tools like CleanStmt that handle diverse bank formats reliably. A data integrity checklist helps verify output correctness.

• •Bank statement PDFs have structural issues: merged cells, multi-line transactions, inconsistent debit/credit columns
• •pdfplumber works for clean text-layer PDFs but fails on scanned documents and non-standard layouts
• •AI OCR tools like CleanStmt handle diverse bank formats; includes a data integrity verification checklist

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.