Bank statements to working papers.
For accountants and tax preparers.
The client turns up in March with twelve statements in a carrier bag, or emails twelve PDFs the week before the deadline. You need every transaction in a spreadsheet, and you need to be able to show that the spreadsheet is complete. A total that does not agree to the bank is not a working paper, it is a guess.
What the work looks like
Tax season means 40 to 100 individual and small-company returns, and for perhaps a third of them the bank statements are the books. A year of statements for one account is 24 to 60 pages, and a sole trader often has a business account, a personal account they also used for the business, and a card. The statements arrive in every form: bank PDFs, scans of paper, photos taken on a kitchen table. Everything has to be done between January and the filing deadline, and the tie-out has to hold up if the return is queried two years later.
Where the time goes
- A year typed into Excel by a junior comes back with totals that do not agree to the statements, and there is no time to find out why.
- Paper statements scanned at an angle put the amount half a row off from the description, so the debits and credits swap.
- You cannot tell from a spreadsheet alone whether a month is missing; only the balances tell you that, and nobody checked them.
- The client's summary of income does not match the deposits, and you need the complete list to have that conversation.
- A review or an enquiry asks how you arrived at a figure, and the honest answer is a spreadsheet somebody built by hand.
- Software subscriptions priced per client or per month make no sense for work that happens in a ten-week burst.
How it runs with stmtai
- Scan or gather the year for one account and run it as a batch of up to 12 files; two batches cover a year of monthly statements.
- Check the balance result on each statement. The transactions are summed and compared to the printed opening and closing balances, and any difference is flagged on the row that caused it.
- Fix flagged rows in place: a faint digit from a photocopy, a line cut by the page break. Re-run until each statement agrees.
- Read the continuity check across the batch: each closing balance has to carry into the next opening. A gap here means a missing statement, and you find out before the return is drafted, not after.
- Open each statement and export it to Excel with the Summary sheet and categories. The Summary records the tie-out; keep it with the working papers.
- Use the 7-day history to re-download while the file is open on the desk, and convert it again from the source PDF if you need it later.
Try it on a real statement
5 pages free, no account. You will know in under a minute whether it balances.
Drop your bank statements here
One file or a whole year. PDF, scanned image, CSV, QIF or OFX. Up to 12 files at a time; long PDFs are split for you.
Not ready to upload your own? See a sample result
Which plan fits
A practice doing tax returns for a season is usually best on Business for the months it needs: 1,200 pages covers roughly 25 to 40 full years of statements, and the 5 team seats let the preparers convert under the firm's plan. A sole practitioner with a handful of shoebox clients can do a full year on Pro, or buy a Pages Pack that never expires and use it as the returns come in.
Export formats you will use
Guides for this work
Questions
Is the balance check good enough as evidence that the transactions are complete?
It shows that the rows extracted sum to the movement between the printed opening and closing balances, statement by statement, and the continuity check shows the statements join up without a gap. That is the same test you would apply by hand. It does not prove the client gave you every account, and it is not an audit opinion; it is a documented tie-out for the accounts you were given.
What about statements that are photographs or poor scans?
They go through the same process. Where a figure cannot be read the balance check will fail and point at the row, so you know exactly which page to ask the client to rescan or which figure to confirm against the bank. Nothing is filled in silently.
Can a preparer work under the firm's plan without a separate account?
On Business, yes. Up to 5 team members are added by email and convert against the firm's 1,200 pages. Pro is a single seat.
The client mixed personal and business spending in one account. Does that matter?
Not to the conversion; every line comes through with the balances checked. The Excel export has a Category column you can relabel Business or Personal in Excel; type those two labels into the blank rows of the Summary sheet's totals table and the live formulas total each, so the split you decide on is visible and can be reviewed.