Built for a Friend. Built for You.

In late March 2025, a friend of mine — Sergio — who owns a flats fishing guide service in South Florida sent me a text asking if I knew a good way he could import his bank transaction data into Microsoft Excel. He wanted to do a thorough analysis of his business revenues and expenses.

I told him it should be easy — most banks let you export transaction data as a CSV file through their online portal. Mine does, for free. CSV files can be opened directly in Excel and most other spreadsheet applications. I was surprised to learn that his bank only provided transaction data as monthly PDF statements.

After some Googling, I found several companies offering bank statement conversion and decided to try the top search results. I figured I would find the best one and recommend it to Sergio. I quickly noticed something interesting: two of the top results appeared to be the same company operating under different domain names. I also noticed that the services generally appeared to fall into two categories — those using generative AI, and those using traditional table-extraction techniques.

I tested five of the top search results using the same ten statements on each service, keeping a detailed log of every issue I encountered — from outright inaccuracies to frustrating user interface quirks.

They all had problems. The AI-based services were prone to hallucinations, confidently outputting transactions that didn't exist. I also had a nagging concern that financial documents submitted to these services might be used to train their AI models — a serious privacy consideration when dealing with sensitive transaction data. The traditional extraction tools struggled in their own ways — missing transactions, malformed data, and formatting that required cleanup before the results were usable. One tool identified transactions reasonably well but required manually checking a box next to each extracted transaction before a CSV could be generated — a tedious extra step that defeated much of the purpose.

I couldn't in good conscience recommend any of these tools to my friend, so I decided to create the converter myself. Sergio had helped me find work during a difficult time in 2020, and I was happy to return the favor.

Sergio dropped off a thumb drive with his bank statement PDFs and I got to work. After about a week of building in my spare time, I had a working application — running locally on my laptop — that converted all of his statements with complete accuracy. A significant portion of that time was spent manually verifying every extracted transaction against the original documents, line by line. Once satisfied, I saved the resulting CSV files to Sergio's thumb drive and returned it to him.

Sergio was grateful. He finally had accurate, well-formatted transaction data he could import directly into Excel and start analyzing right away. He was the one who suggested that other small business owners were probably running into the same problem and encouraged me to make the tool available to others. That conversation was the genesis of TheStatementFox.com.

Who Built This?

My name is Jonas. I'm a software developer based in Florida. I built and maintain TheStatementFox.com entirely on my own, which means when you contact support, you're talking directly to the person who wrote the code.

Questions? Contact Me.