Bulk convert Amex statements to CSV

An expense claim built on "$412.00, no further detail" doesn't hold up to an audit, and that's the failure mode a lot of bulk PDF converters produce on Amex statements once merchant names or transaction references get truncated. The whole point of converting card statements for a claim or a review is being able to say what each charge was for, so anything that clips the description at a fixed width defeats the purpose of doing this at all.

Full merchant names and references are what come through here, on Platinum, Gold, Velocity Platinum, Explorer, Qantas Ultimate and Amex business and corporate cards alike. Categorisation happens automatically as a first pass, and every category stays editable before download, so an unusual merchant that gets miscategorised takes a click to fix rather than a manual line-by-line check of the whole file.

Volume is usually the actual reason someone's here rather than converting one statement at a time. Amex reviews tend to be retrospective and multi-year: an audit response, a reimbursement claim that never got filed, a business trying to untangle personal spending from deductible spending after the fact. A two-year review of one card is twenty-four statements on its own. Ten go into a batch at once, so a year clears in two runs and the whole review is a handful of them, each returned as a single merged CSV in date order.

Batching one financial year at a time tends to be the cleanest way to structure it, since it produces one file per year lining up with how the claim or return actually gets assembled, rather than one large file that needs splitting afterwards.