Where to download your statement
Every bank lays out its online banking differently, but statements are usually in a section called something like Statements, Documents or e-Documents, often under the account itself. Look for a monthly statement for the account and period you want, and download it to your phone or computer.
Many banks also offer a second option, often called Export or Download transactions, which gives a data file instead of a document: CSV, Excel, OFX, QIF or, in some countries, CAMT or MT940. When your bank offers one, prefer it. A data file holds each transaction in its own fields, so nothing has to be guessed from the layout of a page. A PDF is made for people to read; turning it back into rows is reliable most of the time, but never perfect.
What a statement reader has to get right
Whichever app or spreadsheet you use, these are the places where an import goes wrong. Knowing them makes the result much easier to check.
- Date order. 03/04 is the 3rd of April in most of Europe and March 4th in the United States. A reader that guesses wrong puts transactions in the wrong month, and only dates after the 12th reveal the mistake.
- Decimal separators. 1.234,56 and 1,234.56 are the same amount written two ways. Read with the wrong convention, an amount can come out a thousand times too big or too small.
- Debit and credit. Some statements put money out and money in in separate columns, others use one column with a minus sign, and some show a running balance beside them. A reader must not confuse a refund with a purchase, or a balance with an amount.
- Duplicates. Statements often overlap: a new one may start a few days before the previous one ended, or you may import the same month twice. Without duplicate detection, those payments count twice.
- Scanned PDFs. Some PDFs contain only a picture of each page, with no text inside. They need text recognition first, which is slower and can misread a figure.
A checklist before you import
- Pick the right file. Choose a data export if your bank has one; otherwise the PDF statement for the period you need.
- Check the period. Note the first and last date, and whether it overlaps something you already imported.
- Check the date order and the currency of the statement before reading it.
- Look at the preview. Compare a few rows with the statement: one purchase, one refund, one large amount.
- Untick what you do not want, such as transfers between your own accounts, which are not spending.
- Compare the total of what you imported with the statement's own total for the period, if it shows one.
How SpendWe imports a PDF statement
SpendWe never connects to your bank and never asks for your bank login; statements come in only as files you choose (see no bank connection). The PDF statement import lets you pick which rows to add and edit each one first: merchant, amount, date, expense or income, and category. You choose the day/month order before it reads the file. Rows you already imported are unticked when you import an overlapping statement. For a statement in another currency, SpendWe asks you to confirm the currency, converts at today's rate and keeps the original amount; with no rate available, it refuses to import rather than use the wrong figure. On iPhone, an image-only PDF of up to 40 pages is read with on-device text recognition. PDF statement import is part of SpendWe Pro, which is planned and not on sale yet; see pricing.
Bank export files are free
Importing your bank's own export file is free on every plan, from Import a file in Settings (see export and import). SpendWe recognises the file by its content, not its name, and reads CSV, Excel, OpenDocument, OFX and QFX, QIF, CAMT and MT940. For a spreadsheet, it proposes which column is the date, the amount or the description, works out the decimal separator and the date order from the file itself, and shows how confident it is: a short preview with Looks right when it is sure, every column to check when it is not. The layout you confirm is remembered on that device, so the next file from the same bank goes straight to the review. Each row is marked with a reference, built from the bank's transaction id or a fingerprint of the row, so rows already imported are unticked, even from an overlapping file. The reference holds no account number, only a fingerprint of it. And for 7 days, Undo last import removes what the last import added, unless you have changed it since.