Converting bank statements for catch-up bookkeeping

Catch-up bookkeeping doesn't look like normal bookkeeping. There's no steady trickle of transactions to code each week. There's a client who hasn't touched the books since last winter, a folder of PDFs, and a deadline that's already been and gone. All of the work lands at once.

The conversion step is where a lot of that time quietly goes. Twelve monthly statements, opened one at a time, copied into a spreadsheet, columns realigned, dates reformatted. None of it's hard. It's just slow, and it's the part of the job you can least justify billing for.

Batch conversion gets rid of that step. Drop in up to ten statement PDFs at once, set the bank, and every transaction across every file comes back extracted, categorised and merged into a single CSV in date order. A year of one account takes two batches and a couple of minutes. From there it imports into Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks like any other transaction file.

The merged output matters more than it sounds like it should. Twelve separate CSVs still leaves you stitching files together before you can do anything with them. One chronological file, with a Source File column on every row, means you can start reconciling straight away and still trace any figure that looks off back to the statement it came from.