Credit Card Statement Reconciliation

Credit card reconciliation is the process of making sure every transaction on your statement matches your books (or your memory, for personal finance). It's how you catch double charges, missing refunds, incorrect fees and fraud — and it's the #1 reason accountants and bookkeepers need statement data in Excel rather than PDF.

Why reconciliation starts with Excel

You cannot filter, sort, pivot or SUMIF a PDF. In Excel you can:

• Total debits and credits and compare with the statement's closing balance (a mismatch = a missed row).
• Sort by merchant to spot duplicate charges.
• Filter by date range to match bank withdrawals.
• Match every payment row against your bank records.

The reconciliation workflow (4 steps)

1. Convert — upload the statement PDF here and download the XLSX. The Summary sheet already shows total debits, total credits and transaction count.
2. Check the totals — add a formula =SUM(Debit column) and =SUM(Credit column); compare with the statement's printed totals. If they match, extraction was complete. If not, look for wrapped/continued rows on the last page.
3. Match payments & charges — in a second column set, paste your bank records (or open Google Sheets side by side). Use VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP on amount+date to flag unmatched rows.
4. Investigate discrepancies — interest charges, FX fees, pending transactions and refunds are the usual culprits. Flag them, don't force them to match.

Duplicate detection — built into the engine

The parser includes duplicate detection: rows that look identical (same date, description, amount) are flagged during extraction. That catches the classic problem where a payment appears twice — once as a pending transaction and once as posted. Always confirm before deleting a "duplicate" — some legit transactions (two identical coffees!) are genuinely identical.

Frequently Asked Questions