ledgaroo

CommBank statement to CSV

Drop the CommBank PDF as you downloaded it. It is converted on your computer, and we check every row against the running balance and compare the totals with the ones CommBank printed. Then download it for your accounting software or a spreadsheet.

Getting the PDF out of CommBank

  1. Log on to CommBiz and go to Accounts, Online Statements, then Single Statement.
  2. Select Account Statements.
  3. Choose the statement period, then select the account and Search.
  4. Open or download the statements CommBiz lists for that period.

You need View permission for the account, and your CommBiz Administrator can tell you whether you have it. Some account statements are only available to the account owner, who has to be an identified User in CommBiz first.

Changing how often statements arrive, for example from monthly to quarterly, takes the account owner or an authorised signatory visiting a branch or calling 13 1998.

NetBank and the CommBank app keep online statements for up to 7 years, and for up to 2 years once an account is closed.

From CommBank’s own help: View account & activity statements online, Switch to online statements.

What a CommBank statement looks like, and what we do with it

Each statement covers a quarter. Its first page carries the statement number, the period and the closing balance, and on most quarters a tax invoice block of the GST paid on bank services, before the table headed Date, Transaction, Debit, Credit and Balance. Its rows go in date order between OPENING BALANCE and CLOSING BALANCE lines, the only rows that print a year, and every balance ends in CR. Below the table come the totals line and a fee Transaction Summary, and the last page is CommBank’s complaints information.

The date and the first words of the description share one cell, as in "15 Apr Direct Credit", and the reference, amount and balance sit on the line below.
We split the date from the text and join the two lines into one transaction.
Dates carry no year, and a quarter ending 31 December is issued on 1 January, so the date of issue names the wrong year.
We take each row’s year from the statement period, never from the date of issue.
A payment out of the account can still read Direct Credit, with its amount in the Debit column.
We sign each amount by the column it sits in, not by the words beside it, so it comes out as money out.
Balances carry CR after the figure, most of them after a dollar sign as well.
We read CR as a balance in credit and check each row against it.
Fees that include GST are marked (T), as in "(T) COMMBIZ FEES", and a note on the first page says what the mark means.
We keep the mark in the description, so it reaches your ledger for the GST return.
Under the table, "Opening balance - Total debits + Total credits = Closing balance" is followed by a Transaction Summary of fee counts and unit prices.
We check our totals against the line that balances, and leave the fee table’s prices alone.
A printer’s code runs up the left margin, across the transactions.
We drop text set at an angle, so the code never joins a description.

What this page is based on

Twenty-eight quarterly Business Transaction Account statements from the accounts of four business associations, covering the 2023-24 and 2025-26 financial years. In all 28, no row disagreed with a balance CommBank printed beside it, and on 25 our debits and credits also came to the totals line under the table. On the other three, one credit row prints its date and description with no amount beside it, and one of those pages leaves out its Credit and Balance columns altogether, so the file holds no figure to read. Our credits fell short of the printed Total credits by that row, which is what the totals check is for: it marked the gap rather than letting it through. The quarters fell into seven sets of four, each one account’s whole financial year, and every set joined with no break: no quarter’s opening balance differed from the last one’s close.

The other statements CommBiz files under Online Statements (merchant statements, Corporate Card statements and CommBiz activity statements) are ones our parser has not met, and neither is a personal account statement from NetBank. The checks will still flag what does not add up on one of those.

Once it is converted, the import steps for each accounting package are the same for every bank.

Questions

Some of my CommBank quarters start on the 31st. Is a day missing?

No. Several of the quarters we tested ran from 31 December to 30 March, or from 31 March to 30 June, rather than by calendar quarter. We read each period as printed, and quarters like these, opened together, still meet, each starting from exactly the balance its predecessor finished on. A quarter that really is missing shows up as a break between the two files either side of it.

Why does the Transaction Summary cover different months from my statement?

It counts fee-bearing transactions for the three months to the end of the month before the statement closes, so a July to September statement summarises June to August. It is a schedule of CommBank’s fees, not a list of transactions, and we read nothing from it. Any fee CommBank actually charges appears in the table as its own row, which we export.

What is the GST figure at the top of the first page?

Most quarters double as a tax invoice: the first page gives the total of taxable bank services including GST, and the GST paid within it. Both are summaries for the quarter, not transactions, so neither goes into your file. In the quarters we checked, the first figure was the sum of the (T) fee rows in the table, and those rows are what your ledger receives.

Privacy, scans and price work the same for every bank, and the home page answers them.