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Bank statement PDF to Wave

Drop the PDF as you downloaded it. We check every row against the figures your bank printed, then write a CSV in the columns Wave’s statement upload asks for.

Wave CSV comes with Premium. Excel and CSV are free for a whole statement at a time, with no account and no limit on how many. See what Premium costs.

Importing it into Wave

Download the Wave CSV

  1. In Wave, open Accounting, then Transactions.
  2. Choose More, then Upload transactions. Pick the file and the payment account, and choose Upload.
  3. Confirm the date, amount and description columns Wave picks, then choose Upload my statement.

The file names no currency, so Wave records the transactions in the payment account’s. From a credit card statement, purchases are written positive and payments negative, the way round Wave asks for on a card.

What is in the Wave CSV file

The header row is Date, Description, Amount.
A date, an amount and a description are the three columns Wave asks for, and with one of each it picks them for you.
Dates are written 2026-01-23.
Year first, which is the order Wave requires.
One signed amount a row, with no thousands separator.
On a bank account, money out is negative, written as -1850.00. Wave takes separate deposit and withdrawal columns too, but its own help says to use one when a file will not upload.
A credit card’s purchases are positive.
Wave wants a card’s purchases positive and its payments negative, the other way round from a bank account, so a card statement is written that way.
The description column has words in it.
Wave refuses a description column of nothing but numbers, so where no row of a statement has a word in its description, the button says so instead of writing a file Wave will not take.

Every format holds the same checked transactions. The other files we write are on the import page.

Questions

Is my statement uploaded anywhere?

No. The statement is read in your browser, on your computer. Nothing in it is sent to us or to anyone else.

Which currency does Wave record?

The payment account’s. The file names no currency, so choose the account in the same currency as the statement.

Does it handle scanned statements?

Yes, as a PDF, JPG, PNG or WebP. The text is read off the picture by OCR in your browser, and the file never leaves your computer. The first scan takes longer while the reader loads. OCR can misread a figure, so a scan is checked like any other statement. If it prints no running balance, no totals and no closing balance, nothing can check the figures, so the download is held as it is for a failed check, and you look the figures over first. A date misread within the statement period passes every check, so a date OCR was unsure of is marked for you to compare with the scan. A PDF downloaded from online banking is more reliable than a scan. More about scanned statements.

Is it free, and do I need an account?

Excel and CSV are free for a whole statement at a time, with no limit on how many. Premium adds every other format, a CSV in a layout of your own, payee names with rules that set the payee and category, the working paper, part of a statement, several statements joined into one, and downloading every open statement at once. Neither needs an account: Premium is a licence key, which you paste into the page or activate from the email it comes in, and your browser keeps it. The pricing page lists each format and the price.