Exporting Bank Statement from Acrobat to Excel

[Herbert1587]

Hi,

  I see there are some posts already about this issue. We shouldn't have to write a script for every different bank statement out there. I used to be a securities employee and when I switched jobs I had to move my accounts to new banks. Now that I am going through a divorce, I have statements from at least 5 different banks. Acrobat cannot reliably export these to excel. Large ads inside of the statement seems to throw it off. I would like a separate add-in or something done to address this. I think Adobe could at least create scripts or code to allow statements from the the top 10 or 15 banks in the country to flow seamlessly into Excel. That would account for the bulk of the problem. Please contact me directly if you need examples.

Thanks,

Herb 

[J E L]

@Herbert1587 Have you asked your banks if they can provide you with statements as Excel files? Both my banks offer this option and I can download statements or transactions in a variety of formats directly from the bank's website within my account. I realize that isn't what you asking for but perhaps at least one of your five banks will offer this option.

[try67 · Accepted solution]

> Acrobat cannot reliably export these to excel.

- Correct. You need to ask your bank to provide the data in Excel format. All major banks should do it.

> I think Adobe could at least create scripts or code to allow statements from the the top 10 or 15 banks in the country to flow seamlessly into Excel.

- Not going to happen. Adobe is not in the business of creating scripts for other businesses. You can develop such a script yourself or hire someone to do it for you, but keep in mind that any change to the format or layout of these statements will break it. Hence the need to get the raw data in this format without converting it from PDF.

[Herbert1587]

Hi,

I am well aware that banks can download statemens in Excel format. Howver, when you ask a bank for statements from 5 or 8 years ago, this isn't an option. Their web based front ends do not go back that  far. So you have to call them direcdtly or send them a subpoena. Then they send you a bunch of paper that has to be scanned. Also, a lot of the Excel formats are not straight and have images that have to taken out if you want to actually get the data out. 

It would be much easier if I could just take a PDF statement and have adobe just deal with the images and other non important things in the statement and provide a nice clean Excel sheet. I imageine a lot of Law Firms that have discovery issues, would welocme this feature as well. 

[try67]

Sorry, but what you're saying doesn't make sense at all. It's about a thousand times more difficult to extract data from a PDF file than it is from any other file format (short of images, perhaps).

It sounds like your bank is not doing a very good job of it if they are delivering to you an Excel file with images in it. There should be no difficulties at all exporting data from the bank's database into a purely textual format, regardless of how long ago it was. If it's saved digitally then they should be able to do it. Ask for a CSV or tab-delimited text file, if they can't deliver a usable Excel file.

If they can't deliver that either then you can try to process the PDF files, but I'm telling you it would require the development of a custom-made tool, and even that might not work.

[Herbert1587]

Hi,

  I hope you never have to go through a divorce where you need to get statements from years ago. I tried to get electronic copies of everything, so I could just download excel data. It wasn't an option from any of the large banks. Also, not all Excel downloads were the same. Some of them had different column names and spaces that threw off everything. I agree that getting the data from a PDF is difficult, but that's what I'm asking for. There are not that many banks in the USA that they would have to write reoutines for. The top 5 or 6 have most of the USA citiziens. So, I'm asking for help in turning PDF bank statements to nice Excel sheets. I don't think it's that big an ask. I think we can agree to disagree here.

Best,

Herb

[try67]

We're not disagreeing. I'm just letting you know that the solution to this issue will not come from Adobe.

Actually, I'm happy to work on this project for you, for a fee of course. I specialize in exactly this kind of custom-made tools for PDF files. You can contact me privately via [try6767 at gmail.com].

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com]

As a consultant to several banks and financial service corporations, I help them generate the custom PDFs statements that you receive. They all use one or another automated PDF generation program that's customized to their data and clients.

No banks we work with use the same system or process, nor do they produce similar PDF code. In fact, the code that's produced is one ripping mess of data fragments that can be difficult for other software to parse and extract. Plus, all of the banks have changed how they create these PDFs during the past 10 years. What worked on last year's statement probably won't work on the one from 8 years ago.

You could try Acrobat's Save As utility that lets you choose a few different data formats, such as xslx or XML spreadsheet, but knowing what's inside these files, it'll be a hot mess. But you could get at least parts of the data you need that could be copied/pasted into a cleaner spreadsheet for your computations.

If you do have paper copies, you might be able to recover some of it digitally with this method (yes, tedious): Scan the paper copies, OCR them with Acrobat's built-in tool, and then Save As to a CSV, xlsx, XML format. There's a chance that the scanned/OCR'ed PDF will have cleaner code than what's generated by the banks.

Yes, divorce is one of the worst events in life, other than dying itself.  But we're not your enemy here, we're just unpaid volunteers on this user-to-user forum. We are not Adobe, although some of their engineers lurk here.

Lessons learned in this discussion:

• No matter who you're in bed with — personal or business — ensure that you always have access to all financial data, hopefully in a digital format.
• So many financial software programs, even little ones like Quicken, let you set up automatic digital downloads of financial activity from banks, credit cards, and investment brokerages. Make sure you have that in place for the next marriage <grin>. And then make sure you have multiple backups of that data, both onsite and off. And then write this clause into the pre-nup...all financial data is equally shared and accessible.
• Complain to your banks about not being able to get live data from 5-10 years ago. Too many terminate your access to your data after 12 months, but most give 18-24 months. They have our data going back decades from our first paycheck deposited into our accounts. It might be archived, but it's there and they should be able to retrieve it for us, even for a fee.
•  Have @try67 on retainer.
• Don't get married.

[try67]

I can agree with almost all (and especially one...) of the advices given above!

🙂