There’s a lot more on the bank statement that is just a ledger of transactions. Account summary, explanations, notifications and disclosures can be found in the essential information that a bookkeeper will need.
If the primary goal is to transfer transaction data into an accounting system or spreadsheet, it may not be required to handle everything. To develop a more focused workflow, identify those pages that are helpful prior to creating the output.
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It’s Not Meant to Mean More Data.
Think about a company reviewing several months of bank activities. The monthly PDFs could contain 10 or more pages, but only a portion of the document will contain the essential transaction tables required to record the financial transactions.
The manual copying of those tables can provide a solution however, it’s slow and prone to typos. Businesses can convert bank statements to Excel however, only the relevant pages.
Docubrew provides a preview page which enables the user to preview and choose what pages will be processed. You can remove cover sheets, disclosures as well as other pages.
The Previewing First Step Gives You More Control
Automation is most effective in situations where the user can monitor what’s happening.
Rather than simply processing a document in a blind way, Docubrew lets users preview statements before beginning the conversion. The software extracts the figures directly from the source statement instead of using estimates for financial figures.
This preview lets you check that the correct pages have been selected, as well as to look over the extracted data before downloading.
This is a basic but important checkpoint when it comes to financial records.
The Export should be shaped by the destination
In the next step, you will be asked to decide what you want to make of your transactions.
Excel can be useful if bookkeepers need to sort data, examine rows or alter data. CSV is an option for data that is being transferred to a different system. Docubrew also allows QBO output.
Anyone who wishes to convert their bank statements to CSV can do this by generating an CSV file instead of initially creating an Excel document and manually altering the format.
Docubrew’s output has been designed to work with accounting software such as QuickBooks, Xero, and FreshBooks in addition to spreadsheet-based workflows.
Scanned paper statements can be incorporated into the same workflow
The conversion can be made on any PDF document, not only digitally generated ones.
Some older statements are only accessible as scans of paper. Docubrew supports OCR for the PDF format of scanned statements, so that these documents are able to be processed well.
That can be helpful during project bookkeeping that has historical significance, where the latest records are digital, while earlier statements were scanned from paper. Instead of creating two different processes, documents can be processed using the same process of conversion and examined before exporting.
Process locally or utilize the Cloud
The presentation of financial records is just as important as how they are interpreted.
Docubrew’s Windows desktop application runs conversions locally and keeps client documents on the computer. Cloud processing is available for those who prefer using browsers. Docubrew says that uploaded files are encrypted and the transferred documents and documents are automatically deleted after 24 hours.
Ultimately, converting a bank statement to Excel shouldn’t mean feeding every page of every PDF into a tool and hoping the output is useful.
Begin by reading through those pages that contain the information you require. Examine what is being removed. Then choose the appropriate format for the accounting task to follow.
A cleaner financial workflow can begin with less processing rather, by purposefully doing less.