How This Started

What this note is about

The first version came from helping my dad turn business bank statement PDFs into something he could actually use in Excel.

The job was supposed to take a few minutes

The first version of this site came from helping my dad with business bank statements. He had the PDFs. What he needed was a spreadsheet.

Copy and paste looked like it should work, then immediately did not. Descriptions wrapped badly, amounts landed in the wrong places, and the useful rows were mixed with page headings and other statement clutter.

I only wanted the rows

That is still the product in my head: take the statement PDF and give back the transaction rows. Not a recreated page. Not a dashboard. Just something that opens in Excel and can be checked.

I keep the original PDF next to the spreadsheet because the spreadsheet is only a working copy. That habit came from the first messy files.