HSBC statement to CSV

Getting the PDF out of HSBC

Business Internet Banking lets you view, download and print statements, and holds at least six years of them for business current and savings accounts, which download as PDFs.

A Primary User can change how often statements are produced, or switch them off, under Manage Statements in the left-hand menu.

A Secondary User sees only the accounts they are authorised for and the functions they have been given, and a business can have up to 99 of them.

From HSBC’s own help: Business Internet Banking online help, Business Internet Banking.

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

Your Statement opens with an Account Summary box of Opening Balance, Payments In, Payments Out and Closing Balance, beside the period and the IBAN. The table beneath, titled after the product (Your Charitable Bank Account details on ours), runs Date, Payment type and details, Paid out, Paid in and Balance, with Paid out before Paid in and the oldest day first. Each transaction is led by a short code, DR, BP or CR on ours, and a balance appears once a day, after that day’s last transaction. Only the first of three pages holds rows; the rest are rates and terms.

Dates abbreviate the month and shorten the year, written 02 Aug 24.

We read them and write them as 2024-08-02.

A payment runs over three lines: the type code and a reference, then the counterparty, then the description with the amount and the balance. Money paid in takes two, the payer and then the reference with the amount.

We join the lines of each transaction into one row with one amount.

A payment and its PAYMENT CHARGE print as two rows on the same day, both led by DR with the same payee and reference, and only the charge carries a balance.

We keep them as two rows, carry the payment’s amount forward and check both against the balance printed beside the charge.

The list opens with a BALANCE BROUGHT FORWARD row.

We take the opening balance from it and leave it out of the export.

The text in this PDF is broken mid-word, so the Account Summary reads "Ope ning Balance" and "Paym e nts In".

The transaction table still reads, because we find columns by where the figures sit, not by the headings. The summary block does not, so this statement is checked against its running balance only.

What this page is based on

One month of a parish council’s Charitable Bank Account, from 2024: a handful of payments out and two sums paid in, every one reconciled against the end-of-day balance, and the IBAN read off the page as the account it belongs to. Because the summary’s words come apart, its totals and closing balance were not compared, so this page claims the running balance and nothing more. Our samples also hold a scanned HSBC personal statement, but no test has held it to a check yet, so it adds nothing here.

Statements from HSBC UK’s personal accounts, the Commercial Card and HSBCnet sit outside this page, and so do the Small Business Bank Account and the Business Banking Account, whose statements we have not seen.

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

Questions

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