Simple bookkeeping from your bank statements

Can bank statements be your bookkeeping?

For many freelancers, sole proprietors and small shops, yes — as long as you keep business and personal money in separate accounts. Every sale paid into the account and every expense paid from it is already on a statement with a date and an amount. What's missing is what each line was for.

Statements have limits. They show money when it moves, so unpaid invoices and bills you owe aren't there, and they prove you paid, not what you bought. The IRS lists account statements alongside receipts and invoices as records to keep, so keep receipts for anything large or unusual.

Turn a year of statements into books

1. Download the statements for every account the business uses — checking, savings and credit cards — as PDFs, or as CSV if your bank offers it.
2. Upload them together. Each statement is read, every transaction gets a clean payee name and a category, and the totals are checked against the statement's opening and closing balance.
3. Review the categories. Fix the few that are wrong; each fix can become a rule, so next month's statements are categorized the same way.
4. Mark money moving between your own accounts as transfers, so it isn't counted as income or expense.
5. Export to Excel. You get a Transactions sheet and a Summary sheet with totals by category and by month.

Categories that work at tax time

Pick categories you can hand straight to your accountant: Sales, Software, Advertising, Rent, Travel, Meals, Bank fees, Contractors, Owner draws, Transfers. If you file a US Schedule C, naming categories after its expense lines saves a step later — see business expense categories.

Watch for double counting. If you upload your checking account and your business credit card, the card payment from checking is a transfer: the individual card purchases are the expenses. The same goes for moving money to savings and for owner draws, which are not business expenses.

Categorizing is quicker with rules: "description contains SHOPIFY → Sales" applies to every future statement. More in how to categorize bank transactions.

What to send your accountant

Ask first which format they want. Most accountants are happy with this:

• The Excel workbook: every transaction with its category, plus the Summary by category and month
• The original PDF statements, so they can check anything against the source
• A short note on anything unusual: a loan received, equipment bought, personal spending paid from the business account
• Receipts or invoices for large purchases
• Or, if they use QuickBooks or Xero, an import file instead of Excel: QuickBooks Online CSV or Xero CSV

Tracking expenses through the year

You don't have to wait for year end. Convert each month's statements when they arrive and the Summary sheet shows where the money went by month. Card statements work the same way — see credit card statements to Excel — and an expense report is just a filter on the category column.

Combine several statements into one export, optionally limited to a date range, to get a quarter or a whole year in one file.

Do you need a subscription?

No. Page packs are one-time purchases that never expire: 100 pages for $12, 500 for $39. Only pages with transactions count, so if your statements run 3–5 pages a month, a year of one account uses 36–60 pages. If you'd rather convert every month, Pro is $29 a month for 500 pages.

CSV, Excel and OFX files downloaded from your bank use no pages, but still need a pack or plan. Before you pay anything, every upload shows a preview: the transaction count, the balance check result and the first three rows. See pricing.

Questions