Not an accountant; trying to understand how accountants actually deal with 100-page bank statement PDFs
I'm not in accounting or bookkeeping myself, so apologies if this is a basic question to people who do this daily. I'm just trying to understand the real workflow.
Let's say a client hands you a bank statement as a PDF and you need the transactions in Excel to actually work with them. What do you actually do?
manually copy/paste,
hand it to a junior,
use some Excel/PDF trick,
use a PDF to Excel website,
use an online bank-statement converter,
use your own script, or something else entirely?
I'm especially curious what happens with 50, 100, or 300+ page statements. My guess is converting the PDF isn't the hard part. But knowing the conversion is actually correct is the real deal.
For example things like;
wrapped descriptions,
swapped debit/credit columns,
a missing Cr/Dr indicator,
balances that don't reconcile,
one missed transaction that makes the whole spreadsheet questionable.
Am I even thinking about the right failure points, or is the real pain somewhere else entirely?
What's the most annoying part of this for you? And roughly how long does a typical 50 to 100 page statement take to turn into clean, usable Excel ?
Also I'm curious about which banks you deal with the most: CRDB, NMB, NBC, Stanbic, Equity, Exim, Absa, or others?
Genuinely just trying to learn how this works in practice, would appreciate hearing the real workflow, and annoying challenges included.
Thank your for your time in advance.