Password-protected bank statement PDF to Excel
Banks email statements locked with a password made from your date of birth or account number. How to open one, and why you should not strip the password first.
Banks that email statements almost always lock them. Open the file and you get a password prompt before you see a single transaction.
What the password usually is
Banks rarely say directly, so the common patterns are worth knowing:
- Date of birth, as
DDMMYYYYorDDMMYY. - Account number, or its last four to six digits.
- Customer or CIF number.
- National ID or tax number, often the first letters joined to a date of birth.
- Occasionally surname in capitals followed by a date of birth.
The covering email usually describes the rule even when it does not give the password. If nothing works, your bank can tell you the format - they will not tell you the password itself.
Do not remove the password first
The usual advice is to open the PDF, print it to a new unlocked PDF, and convert that. Do not.
Re-printing rasterises the page. The text becomes a picture of text, and every amount then has to be guessed back out by OCR instead of being read exactly as the bank wrote it. You take a file that would have converted perfectly and turn it into a scan.
Upload the locked file as it is. When a PDF needs a password you are asked for it, the file is opened in memory, and the conversion runs on the real text layer. The password is used for that one read and is never stored.
If the password is wrong
You are told straight away rather than after a long wait, because the password is checked before any parsing begins. Try another format from the list above.
What comes back
Date, reference, description, amount and running balance as real Excel values - dates that sort, numbers that add up. Then Excel, CSV, or a layout ready for QuickBooks or Xero.