Convert Wells Fargo Statements to Excel

We have tested one Wells Fargo combined statement of accounts, a business checking account and a business savings account under one statement period, supplied as a scanned PDF with no text layer, over five runs. This page describes that layout. We have not tested a personal checking statement, a credit card statement or a born-digital Wells Fargo PDF, and the page makes no claim about them.

The statement prints its closing date and its page count, as a position within a total, at the top of every page. It may open with notices and messages before anything about the accounts. A summary of accounts table then lists every account in the statement, the page its section starts on, and its balance at the end of the previous statement and of this one.

Each account then gets a section of its own, headed with the product name. The section opens with a statement period activity summary: the beginning balance on the first day of the period, deposits and credits, withdrawals and debits with a leading minus sign, and the ending balance on the last day. The transaction history follows, and the fee summaries, service charge tables and account notices come after it. The savings section adds an interest summary before its history.

The transaction history is a table with a date column, a check number column, a description column, separate columns for deposits and credits and for withdrawals and debits, and an ending daily balance column. Dates are printed as month and day only, with no year. Amounts carry no sign: the column a figure sits in says which way the money moved.

The ending daily balance is printed once per day, on the last transaction of that day, and the balance column is blank on every other row. A long history runs across several pages under a heading marked as continued, with the column headings repeated on each page, and a totals row closes it with the account's total deposits and total withdrawals.

Descriptions that do not fit on one line wrap onto a second line beneath the row, with nothing in the amount columns. A marker in the check number column flags business-to-business ACH debits, explained in a footnote after the history. Cheques are printed as dated rows in the history with their number in the check number column, and then printed again after the history in a summary of checks written, laid out in three groups of number, date and amount columns, with gaps in the cheque sequence marked.

Each account section is read as its own account, in printed order, and every row is attributed to the section it was printed under. The grouping is shown before the rows on the review screen, each account with its own result, and the exported file carries an account column holding the section header as printed.

A wrapped second line is joined back onto the row above it, so a description reads as one cell. The balance is read from the same printed line as each row's own amount: a row with nothing printed in that column has no balance, and the day's ending balance is never carried up onto the rows above it. The summary of checks written is a second printing of money that left the account once, and it is not read as transactions; each cheque appears once, from its dated row in the history.

Each amount is recorded with its direction, taken from the column it was printed in, and the sign of the figure is set from that direction rather than from any word in the description. The rows print no year, so each date is recorded in full, year included, as read against the statement period.

Each account prints its own beginning balance, its own ending balance and its own deposit and withdrawal totals, so each account is reconciled on its own: the beginning balance plus the rows read as deposits minus the rows read as withdrawals should equal the ending balance. One account reconciling says nothing about the other, and the result is shown per account.

The rows are also summed and compared with the deposit and withdrawal totals the statement prints for the account, a second check against figures the bank printed rather than figures we derived. A gap there usually means a transaction was missed.

Because the balance is printed once per day rather than on every row, the running balance can only be checked at the rows that carry one: each printed balance is compared with the balance before it and the amounts in between. Rows that could not be checked individually are marked as checked at document level rather than row by row, so you can see which figures were confirmed one by one and which were not.

Every page number is read and compared with the page count the statement declares. Pages that carry no transactions, such as the opening notices, the fee summaries and the balance worksheet at the end, are expected and are not reported as a problem. A declared page that was not read is.

A check only runs when the statement prints the figures it needs. When it does not, StackExtract reports that the check could not run, never that it passed, because an absent check and a passed check are different facts and showing them the same way would make neither mean anything.

A combined statement is one document: several accounts under one period, each with its own printed totals, and each checked against them. A PDF that holds two statement periods is a different thing. StackExtract reads one statement period and one set of printed totals per upload, so a second period's rows would be checked against the wrong figures and flagged, or not read at all. Upload each statement period on its own.

StackExtract is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Wells Fargo & Company or any other bank. It reads a document you already have.

XLSX is the usual choice when a person is going to read the file: it opens in Excel with the columns intact, including the account column, and rows that need review are tinted. CSV is the choice when something else will consume the rows.

There is also a QuickBooks-ready CSV, with the date, description and amount columns that import expects and nothing else. QuickBooks imports one account per file, so a combined statement exports one CSV per account, downloaded together as a zip and named by account and its last four digits. They are files you download and import yourself. They are not QBO files, not Web Connect, and not a connection to your accounting software or to the bank.