A year of bank statements for your tax return.
For freelancers and sole traders.
You have one account, maybe two, and the business and the rest of your life run through the same card. Once a year you need to know what came in, what went out on the business, and to be able to show where those numbers came from. You do not have a bookkeeper and you do not want a subscription for a job you do once.
What the work looks like
One current account and one card is typical, sometimes a separate account you opened for the business and then only half used. Twelve monthly statements of 3 to 6 pages each, downloaded from online banking in January when the return is due, or in a rush the week before. Personal groceries, client invoices, software subscriptions and a train ticket all sit on the same page. The job is one sitting: get the year into a spreadsheet, split business from personal, total it, and keep it in case anyone asks.
Where the time goes
- Online banking only lets you download a CSV for the last few months, so the rest of the year is PDFs.
- Copying twelve statements into a spreadsheet by hand takes a whole day and you still are not sure you got every line.
- Personal and business spending are mixed on every page and there is no column to sort by.
- You added it up twice and got two different totals, and you do not know which one to trust.
- Paying a monthly subscription for something you need once a year feels wrong, and it is.
How it runs with stmtai
- Download the twelve monthly PDFs from online banking and drop them in as a batch of up to 12 files, so the whole year goes through at once.
- Check the balance result on each month. The rows are summed and compared to the printed opening and closing balances, so a missed or misread line shows up now rather than in your total.
- Fix any flagged row in place, then read the continuity check across the twelve months: each closing balance has to carry into the next opening. If a month is missing, you will see the gap.
- Open each month and export it to Excel. Overwrite the Category cell with Business or Personal on each row and type those two labels into the blank rows of the Summary sheet's totals table; the totals are live formulas, so the business figures fall out as you go.
- Keep the Excel file with the PDFs. If you are asked to show your working, the statement, the spreadsheet and the tie-out are all there.
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
The Free plan's 10 pages a month is enough to try it on a couple of statements. For the year in one go, a Pages Pack is the honest answer: 100 pages for $19, never expires, and a year of a typical account is 40 to 70 pages. Pro is for people converting every month, which you are not.
Export formats you will use
Guides for this work
Questions
Can it tell which transactions are business and which are personal?
It can suggest a category from the description, and you decide. Nothing here knows that your Tuesday lunch was a client meeting. The categories column in the Excel export is there for exactly this: go down the list, set business or personal, and the Summary sheet gives you the totals.
Is a Pages Pack really enough for a whole year?
Usually. A month of a personal current account is 3 to 6 pages, so a year is 40 to 70 pages, and a card is similar. Two accounts might need two packs. If a file needs more pages than you have left, nothing is charged and you are told how many pages it is, and the 5 free pages with no account let you check one statement first.
I do not have PDFs for every month. What then?
Most banks let you download past statements as PDFs from online banking, usually for several years back. Convert what you have in one batch, and the continuity check will show the missing months as a gap between one closing balance and the next opening. Then you know exactly which statements to go and fetch.
Does it work on a scan of a paper statement?
Yes, and the balance check is what keeps it honest. A faint digit on a photocopy will make the total disagree with the printed balance, and the row is flagged for you to correct against the paper. Nothing is guessed to make it balance.