Bank statement cleaning: the format your accounting team actually needs

A bank statement PDF looks complete until someone tries to actually use it for entry or reconciliation. Here's what separates a usable cleaned statement from one that just looks tidy.

Dates need to be dates, not text that looks like dates

A column full of strings that resemble dates will break every sort, filter and formula downstream. Converting to a true date type — and catching the ambiguous day-first vs month-first cases — is worth doing properly once rather than fixing repeatedly.

Split debit and credit, don't rely on sign alone

Some bank exports use a single signed amount column; others already split debit/credit but inconsistently. A clean output should have unambiguous separate columns, with the original value preserved alongside for audit purposes.

Pull the reference number out of the narration

UTR, cheque number or transaction reference is often buried inside a long narration string. Extracting it into its own column makes reconciliation against other records dramatically faster — but the original narration should stay untouched alongside it.