About StatementSmith

What it is

Banks export statements in whatever format suits them. Accounting software reads whatever format suits it. The gap between those two is a job somebody has to do every month, and it is nobody's idea of interesting work.

StatementSmith closes that gap. Drop in what your bank gave you, choose what your software wants, get the file. No account, no limit, and nothing uploaded unless it is a PDF.

Who runs it

StatementSmith is operated by Laantri Marketing LLC, a company registered in Wyoming. The full details are on the terms page, and contact@statementsmith.com reaches a person rather than a queue.

It is a small operation. That is visible in some places: there is no chat widget and no phone line. It is also the reason for some of the choices below.

Why it runs in your browser

Every format but a PDF is converted on your own machine, in the page you are looking at, and never uploaded. Reading a PDF needs a server, so it is the single exception, and the privacy page sets out exactly what happens to it.

This is the single decision the whole product is built around, and it was made for a reason that has little to do with technology. A bookkeeper converting a client's statement is handling somebody else's financial life. Asking them to upload it means asking them to vouch for a stranger's retention policy, breach history and jurisdiction, on behalf of a client who was never consulted.

Doing the work locally removes the question rather than answering it. For every format but PDF there is no retention policy to read, because nothing is retained, and no deletion to take on trust, because nothing arrived.

It is also the one privacy claim a visitor can check for themselves in under a minute: open the network tab and convert a CSV.

The balance check

The failure that matters in this job is not a converter that refuses a file. It is one that accepts it, drops three rows, and hands back something that imports cleanly and is wrong.

Nothing turns red. The count looks plausible. It surfaces weeks later at reconciliation, as a discrepancy someone now has to trace back through a process they have half forgotten.

So every conversion here is reconciled before you download it. The transactions are totalled and compared against the closing balance, read from the statement's own running-balance column where it has one, or typed in from the page where it does not. If the two disagree you are told the exact size of the gap, rather than that everything went fine.

That is the whole idea. Most converters convert. The useful one tells you when it missed something.

What it does not do

Worth stating plainly, because a tool asking for this much trust should be first to name its limits.

• It reads statements, not documents in general. Finding the columns means reading the layout a statement uses. An invoice, a payslip or a report has none of that structure, so it will not give you anything useful for one.
• It does not categorise anything. It has no idea what your chart of accounts looks like and will not guess. Categorisation stays where it belongs, in your accounting software.
• It does not remember you unless you ask it to. The converters need no account, keep no history and list no recent files. A paid plan for PDF pages does need an account, and then we hold an email address and a page count, nothing more.
• It cannot promise your software will accept a given file. Some of these formats are vendor-specific and partly undocumented, and we say so on the terms page rather than claiming otherwise in marketing.

How it is built

The conversion core has no dependencies beyond a CSV parser, and imports no framework code at all, so it can be tested in isolation and cannot quietly acquire a server dependency.

It is verified against an independent implementation rather than against itself. The output is compared byte for byte with a reference implementation. Workbooks it writes are opened by a separate spreadsheet library, to confirm that dates come back as dates and amounts as numbers. Written as text they would look identical on screen and fail the moment anyone totalled a column.

That is more care than a free converter strictly needs. It is proportionate to what the files contain.

Getting in touch

If something will not convert, contact@statementsmith.com is the place. The contact page explains what to send, which is emphatically not the statement itself.