FNB bank statement to Excel: a guide for accountants

An FNB client sends you a PDF at the end of the month and you need the figures in a spreadsheet to reconcile them. The statement is a Tax Invoice/Statement saved from FNB Online Banking or the FNB App. ExtractPro reads that PDF and returns an Excel workbook with one row per transaction. This guide covers what the document contains, what the workbook contains and which printed figures the file has to match before it is delivered.

The statement that is converted

ExtractPro converts the FNB account statement headed Tax Invoice/Statement, such as the one a Gold Business Account receives. It carries a Tax Invoice/Statement Number and a Statement Period, and its transaction table has five columns: Date, Description, Amount, Balance and Accrued Bank Charges. Amounts are in rand. A credit amount ends in Cr and a debit amount has no suffix; the balance is printed with Cr or Dr. The foot of every page reads Page N of M.

The FNB App guide for saving a statement ends with “Click download icon to save verified statement onto your smartphone” and adds “You will be able to access your verified statement from your cellphone files or use a PDF viewer”. Source: FNB, FNB App how-to guide: How to download a verified statement, www.fnb.co.za/downloads/fnb-app/how-to-guides/2020/Download-Verified-Statement.pdf, accessed 11 October 2026. The file you upload is the PDF, as FNB produced it. The steps are in the guide to downloading an FNB bank statement.

Anything else FNB issues, such as a card statement or a loan statement, is a different document and does not go through this conversion.

How the Excel comes out

• Date: FNB prints the day and the month (06 Sep) and no year. ExtractPro takes the year from the Statement Period, so every row in the Excel has a full date in DD/MM/YYYY format.
• Description: the text of the Description column. A few rows, such as fees charged when the period closes, have no description in the PDF; those rows come out with the description empty rather than with text added.
• Amount: a credit (Cr) becomes a positive amount and a debit a negative one, stored as numbers that Excel can total.
• Balance: the balance printed on the row, with a balance marked Dr coming out as a negative number.
• Accrued bank charges: an extra column that keeps the accrued charge printed on a row apart from the amount.

How the file is checked

The conversion starts from the Opening Balance and adds each transaction in turn. After every row, the running figure has to equal the balance FNB prints on that row, and the last one has to equal the Closing Balance. FNB also prints No. Credit Transactions and No. Debit Transactions, each with a total; the number of credits and the number of debits in the file, and their sums, have to match those figures to the cent. The file is rejected, and no Excel is delivered, when:

• the transactions do not lead from the Opening Balance through the balance on every row to the Closing Balance;
• the count or the total of credit or debit transactions differs from the one FNB prints;
• a date falls outside the Statement Period;
• one of the pages listed in Page N of M is missing.

A scanned statement, or one printed to an image, has no text layer to read and is rejected too. Use the PDF the bank produced.

Several statements in one PDF

You can merge consecutive monthly statements into one PDF, twelve or twenty-four months for example, and convert them together. ExtractPro checks each statement on its own, with the same figures as above. Then it checks the file as one chain: the statements have to follow one another in date order with no month missing, and the Opening Balance of each has to equal the Closing Balance of the one before. If a month is missing, or the balances do not carry over, the file is rejected. The Excel comes back as one continuous sheet, oldest transaction first. An overdrawn balance printed without Cr or Dr is read as a debit balance.

From the Excel to the reconciliation

The workbook is ready for the usual month-end work. Credits can be filtered and matched against the sales invoices, debits sorted by description and allocated to accounts, and the balance column checked against the bank account in the ledger. Bank charges that FNB accrues sit in their own column, apart from the transactions. Every statement comes back with the same columns, so a single reconciliation template covers all periods, and the column mapping to your accounting software's import layout is done once. The FNB PDF stays in the client file as the original record.

• Convert an FNB bank statement to Excel