Scanned Bank Statements Are Where Confidence Gets Dangerous

What this note is about

A clear scan can work, but a bad scan should not produce a spreadsheet that looks more certain than it is.

Readable is not the same as reliable

A person can often read a bad scan by using context. Software can make the same bad scan look cleaner than it deserves.

A spreadsheet can look official even when OCR missed a decimal, merged two rows, or guessed at a faint character.

I would rather fail than guess

If a preview has blank descriptions, impossible amounts, repeated rows, or missing page chunks, the right move is to get a better source file instead of patching the spreadsheet by hand.