Convert a PDF Bank Statement to OFX

OFX (Open Financial Exchange) is what online banking produces when you choose "download transactions". Budgeting and accounting apps treat it as a first-class import: YNAB, GnuCash, Moneydance and Actual Budget all read it. When the bank's download window has closed — last year's statements, an account you have since closed — the PDF is often all that is left, and this turns it back into the file the bank would have given you.

Every transaction in the file carries a stable ID derived from the statement, so apps that honour those IDs can identify a repeated import of the same file, and the file includes the statement's closing balance when it has one, which lets the app show whether it agrees.

The file is OFX 1.02, the version with the widest support. Each transaction has its date, a signed amount, a short name (OFX limits it to 32 characters) and the full description as a memo. Card and loan statements are written as credit card accounts.

OFX is not the file QuickBooks or Quicken want. Their variants, QBO and QFX, add a bank code that the program checks against its own list. Both are offered as separate downloads: a PDF carries no bank code, so they use Wells Fargo's code (3000, which may be labelled Wells Fargo), and you pick your own account while importing.

As with QIF, every transaction needs an exact date. If the statement leaves one ambiguous, the download is refused before any charge and the Excel file keeps the date as printed.

GnuCash's manual documents File → Import → Import OFX/QFX. Select the file, choose the account it belongs to, and examine the transaction matcher before accepting the rows. Match an existing purchase rather than adding it again. Check the account currency and one known payment as well as the closing balance.

These menu steps were checked against the official manual; a real import of Sonomir's file has not been recorded. The GnuCash guide explains the separate tasks of reading a PDF and reviewing the resulting transactions in your books.

A transaction ID helps only when the destination honours it. IDs are stable for repeated downloads of the same converted result. A new extraction, a renamed statement or a transaction already obtained from the bank may produce different IDs. Limit overlapping dates and still inspect duplicate candidates.

The OFX download uses the older 1.02 SGML structure; it is not an OFX 2 XML document. Renaming it to .xml or .qfx does not change its structure or add the bank identification an Intuit importer may require. Use PDF to QBO for QuickBooks Desktop and PDF to QFX for Quicken Web Connect. Those files identify the institution as Wells Fargo using code 3000, not a bank connection or a certification of your statement.

For YNAB, see the file-based statement import guide. Review your chosen app's support for the file format before paying; no Sonomir import pass in YNAB, GnuCash or Moneydance has been recorded yet. If an importer refuses a file, keep the exact error and app version for support rather than changing tags at random.

An ambiguous transaction date blocks the accounting export before charging. Excel and CSV keep the dates as printed for review. Every statement should belong to one account and currency; the converter does not calculate exchange rates.

With the two free pages unused, a three-page statement costs one paid page and includes OFX: $0.25 at the $5-pack rate or $0.30 at the $3-pack rate. With no free pages left, it costs three paid pages. The minimum purchase is $3 for 50 credits. If all processing fitted in the free pages, OFX costs 2 credits once for that result.

For recurring, high-volume work, a subscription converter may be more economical. ProperSoft also processes on your computer, whereas Sonomir sends the uploaded pages to a cloud model. Neither format choice nor matching balances guarantees extraction accuracy; compare dates, descriptions and amounts with the PDF before importing.

Upload a bank statement — the PDF your bank emailed, a scan, or phone photos of the pages — and every transaction comes back as a row: date, description, money out, money in, a signed amount and the running balance. Transactions from every page land in one table, so a twelve-page statement is one list, not twelve fragments to stitch together.

Then comes the part that matters: the tool checks its own work. It adds up what it read and compares the result with the balances printed on the statement. When they agree to the cent, the extracted amounts are consistent with those balances. Offsetting errors can still cancel out, so a passing check is a useful review aid, not proof of accuracy. When they do not, it tells you by how much and flags the rows where the running balance breaks, so you check three lines instead of three hundred.

Two independent checks run on every statement.

1. Opening + money in − money out = closing. The opening and closing balances are read from the statement's summary or its first and last lines. If the transactions read in between do not produce the closing balance exactly, something is missing or wrong, and the difference is shown.
2. Row by row. Where the statement prints a running balance, each one must equal the previous balance plus that line's money in minus its money out. A break points straight at the problem: the flagged row, or the one just above it.

The arithmetic is done in whole cents, never in floating point, so a check cannot pass by rounding. Statements listed newest-first are recognised, and so are card and loan statements, where the balance is money owed and runs the other way.

A passing check shows that the extracted amounts agree with the balances that were read. It cannot rule out offsetting errors, omitted pairs of transactions, or incorrectly read balances. Check dates and descriptions, compare the row count with the source, and review important amounts before importing.

The Excel workbook has three sheets:

• Transactions — one row per transaction, in the order printed, with the page it came from and a Check column that says why a row was flagged.
• Balance checks — each check, whether it passed, and the numbers behind it.
• Statement summary — bank, the last four digits of the account, period, currency, opening and closing balances, totals, and whether it reconciles.

Amounts are stored as numbers, not text, so SUM works straight away. Dates are written as year-month-day when the statement makes the year clear, which sorts correctly everywhere. Choose the full transaction CSV to keep the review columns, or a QuickBooks Online, Xero or YNAB CSV layout for its documented import fields. All layouts share one CSV purchase for the same result. Accounting layouts leave out balances and check notes; each statement has a separate file, and multiple files download as a ZIP.

Upload several PDFs at once — twelve monthly statements, say — and they come back in one workbook with a Statement column, plus a summary row for each.

A PDF downloaded from online banking often already contains its text. That text is read with its printed column positions before a model turns it into records. This avoids recognising letters and digits from pixels, but the model can still misinterpret a column or a wrapped description.

A scanned statement, or photos of printed pages, is read from the image. That works well on a flat, straight, well-lit page. It struggles with faint thermal-style printing, pages shot at an angle, and folds across the amount columns. The balance check is your safety net here: if a digit was misread, the running balance breaks at that row.

Photos uploaded together are treated as the pages of one statement, in the order you chose them. Each PDF is its own statement.

It is built for current, checking and savings account statements, and reads card and loan statements too. It is not built for investment or brokerage statements, where a row is a holding rather than a movement of cash. If your bank locks its statements with a password, enter it when the page asks: the PDF is unlocked in your browser, the password never leaves your device, and only the unlocked copy is uploaded. Without the password the tool cannot open it and will not try to get around it.

It has not been tested against a named list of banks, and this page will not pretend otherwise. Statement layouts vary enormously; what the tool offers instead is a result you can verify. If the checks pass, the extracted numbers agree with the balances read from the source. If they fail on your bank's layout, the job tells you so plainly.

We compared the model's extracted rows with labelled, fictional statements: separate debit and credit columns, signed amounts, German decimal commas, Indian number grouping, wrapped descriptions, a dense multi-page list, a credit card, scans and phone photos. These are synthetic examples, not a certification for any named bank.

The eight text-PDF cases and two scanned-PDF cases matched every labelled date, description, amount and direction in this run. A photographed statement lost a digit from two transaction descriptions even though its balance checks passed. Review the source rows, especially long reference numbers in photos. Results can vary between runs; this test does not establish an accuracy percentage for your files, mixed-currency support or successful imports into accounting software.

Compare QBO, QFX, OFX and QIF before importing. The Xero CSV page explains its preset, while password-protected statements covers opening a PDF with your own password. For spreadsheet review, use Google Sheets. Each route uses the same converter; no accounting-app import pass is claimed. Still need the statement itself? How to extract a bank statement covers downloading it from online banking, and getting a year of statements ready for your accountant covers tax-season batches.

Statements are sensitive, so here is exactly what happens. The uploaded file is sent to the reading model and deleted from storage when the job ends, whether it succeeded or not. Only the last four digits of an account number are kept. The transactions you see are stored with your job so the download still works if you come back later; use Delete this result to remove it sooner. Nothing you upload is ever published. To weigh this against other converters, see is it safe to use a bank statement converter?

The first 2 pages a day are free, with the balance checks, and you can copy every row you see. That is enough to see whether the tool reads your bank's layout correctly before you pay anything.

Past that, pages are $0.25 each (5 credits, at the $5-pack rate), and a statement with paid pages gets every download free: Excel, CSV, QBO, QFX, QIF and OFX. With the two free pages still available, a six-page statement costs 20 credits for the other four pages, workbook included. If you have no credits, the smallest purchase is $3 for 50 credits, before any applicable tax; the statement uses $1.20 of it and 30 credits remain. A statement that fits inside the free pages downloads as Excel or CSV free; QBO, QFX, QIF and OFX are 2 credits, once per job. Credits never expire, there is no subscription, and a job that fails is not charged.