Bank Statement Conversion for Tax Preparers

The statements that arrive during tax season are rarely tidy. Some are digital PDFs from a portal, some are scans of paper, and some are photographs a client took on their phone. StackExtract takes any of them, extracts the transaction activity, and puts it in front of you as editable rows before anything is exported to CSV or XLSX.

It is document preparation, and it is worth being clear about the boundary: StackExtract is not tax software. It gets client records out of PDFs and into a spreadsheet you can work in. What happens to the numbers after that is your work and your judgement.

The preview is free and complete: you see every extracted row, with its flags, before deciding whether to export. On client documents that arrive in unknown condition, that is the useful order — you find out whether a statement converted cleanly before it costs anything, rather than after.

Before you export, the review screen shows what the checks found. On a bank statement that is chiefly the balance arithmetic — opening plus credits minus debits against the printed closing figure — which runs when the statement supplies those figures and reports honestly when it does not.

What StackExtract does not do is interpret. It does not categorise expenses, identify deductions, assign Schedule C codes or form a view on the tax treatment of anything. It reads what the statement says and flags what does not add up. The classification is yours, and a tool that guessed at it would be giving you something to check rather than something to use.

Where a statement will not reconcile at all, that is reported rather than hidden, and it is usually worth knowing before the engagement proceeds: a statement whose own figures disagree is a conversation with the client, not a conversion problem.

Nothing is quietly corrected, either. Where a statement contradicts itself the figures are shown as printed and the row is flagged, and where a statement supplies nothing to check against, that is reported as a check which could not run rather than as a pass.

The backlog is usually historical rather than current. A client who needs three years reconstructed, an account closed in the spring whose statements are now only PDFs, a business whose bank feed reaches back ninety days when the return needs twelve months.

Those are the documents where the alternative is typing, and typing is where the errors come from. StackExtract converts and checks; the rest of the engagement is unchanged.

Pricing is per document rather than per page, which suits this work specifically. A client engagement is usually many statements of wildly varying length, and a forty-page business statement is exactly the one you least want to retype and would least like to be charged by the page for.

Exports are CSV and XLSX, plus a QuickBooks-ready CSV for bank statements. XLSX is usually the right choice when the file is going into workpapers, because it survives being read by a person.

There is no direct integration with tax software, with QuickBooks, or with any accounting platform in this version. You download a file and take it where it needs to go.

Each PDF is one document whatever its length, and a document that fails to extract costs nothing at all. On client packets of unknown quality, that is the property that makes it safe to simply try the file.