Turn a PDF bank statement into a budget - and what to do if your bank isn't supported

Which banks' PDFs are read

Why PDF statements are hard to import

A PDF statement is a picture of a page, not a table. It stores where each piece of text sits on the page, and nothing says that one string is a date, another is a merchant and a third is an amount. Every bank lays its statement out differently, and even one bank can change columns, fonts or wrapping from one year to the next. Reading a PDF reliably means writing a separate reader for each layout.

That is why Home Budget Analytics supports PDF only for the four banks above, where a reader has been built and checked. A scanned or photographed statement is a different problem again: PDFs are never OCR'd, so an image of a statement will not be read at all.

If your bank is not on the list

You have three practical options, in order of how quickly they work:

• Download a different format from your bank. OFX/QFX and CAMT.053 (an XML format common at European banks) are structured files that any bank can use, and both are recognized without any setup. OFX must declare a currency in the file, otherwise the import is refused with a message. See [the supported formats](/bank-formats) for details.
• Export a CSV. A CSV from almost any bank works: you tell the app which column is the date, the description and the amount, and you can save that mapping. The full walkthrough is in [the CSV import guide](/csv-import).
• Send your PDF for support. If you upload a file that cannot be read and choose to send it, the developer can add the bank. This is usually done within 24 hours of the upload, but it is not guaranteed. The file is kept until support is added and is opened only for that purpose.

What you get once the PDF imports

Every transaction is extracted from the file and checked against what you have already imported. Re-uploading the same statement, or one that overlaps by a few days, does not create duplicates: matches on date, merchant, amount and currency are skipped. By default the original PDF is deleted right after a successful import and only the extracted transactions stay; you can choose to keep originals in Settings.

The first time a merchant appears, you confirm its category once, and that rule applies every time it comes back. The categorization is rule-based and your transactions are not sent to any AI service. From there you get spending by category, monthly trends, category budgets with a safe daily spend, recurring payments and subscriptions detected from the history, and savings goals with a projected completion date. The 14-day free trial is enough to try this with your own statement.

Home Budget Analytics works only from files you upload. It does not connect to your bank and never asks for your bank credentials. The maximum upload size is 20 MB per file.