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Santander statement to CSV

Drop the Santander 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 Santander printed. Then download it for your accounting software or a spreadsheet.

Getting the PDF out of Santander

  1. In the Santander Business Banking mobile app, tap the envelope icon on the Home screen.
  2. Tap the statement in your Statement and documents inbox, and it opens in a PDF viewer.
  3. Tap the arrow icon in the top right corner to download it.

Filter at the top of the inbox narrows it by date, account type and document type.

A Business Current Account - Classic is paper-free: its statements arrive as e-Documents in the secure inbox in Online Banking. To have them posted instead, change the account’s settings once it has been open for 24 hours.

Employees can be given their own log on details to see the business’s transactions in Online Business Banking, and access can be switched to view only.

From Santander’s own help: e-Documents mobile demo, Business Current Account - Classic, Online Banking, Business Help & Support.

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

Page one is Your account summary: the period, the statement number with its year, Balance brought forward from the previous statement, Total credits, Total debits and the balance at close of business, beside a News and information column. Page two is Important messages, and the rows come on page three under Date, Description, Credits, Debits and Balance, credits first, oldest first. Every figure in the table is bare; only the summary’s Total debits carries a minus, set before the pound sign.

Dates carry an ordinal and no year, written 8th Feb.
We read the ordinal and take the year from the period on the first page, so 8th Feb becomes 2024-02-08.
The transactions wait until page three of three, behind the summary and a page of Important messages that includes a table of unarranged overdraft rates and fees for each kind of business account.
We find the table by its columns wherever it sits. The rate table has no dates in it, so we never read it as transactions.
Only the last transaction of a day carries a balance.
We carry the earlier amounts forward and check them against the next printed balance.
The table opens with a Previous statement balance row and closes with a Current statement balance row.
We take the opening and closing balances from them and export neither as a transaction.
The first page prints Total credits and Total debits, the debits with a minus.
We compare our totals with them, reading the minus as direction.

What this page is based on

One monthly statement from a parish council’s business account, from 2024, whose only activity was three cheques paid out on the same day. All three were carried to the one balance printed after the last, our debits matched Total debits and our credits its zero Total credits, and we picked out its IBAN as the account number. It is a quiet month, so it proves the layout more than it proves a busy statement.

Santander Edge and the bank’s other personal current accounts, its Rewards and All in One credit cards, and Santander Connect for corporate customers are outside this page. So are the PDFs Online Business Banking makes under Download transactions, which are lists of transactions rather than the statement.

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

Questions

Does this cover a Santander Treasurer’s Current Account?

Possibly, but we can’t prove it. The statement we tested is headed only Business Account, so it does not say which product it is. Santander sells the Treasurer’s Current Account to clubs, societies and charities, and the unarranged overdraft table on page two of our statement lists the Treasurer’s Current Account among the business accounts it applies to. If yours has the same three pages, with the table on page three, nothing in it should be new to us, and a row that fails its balance check would say otherwise.

Online Business Banking already downloads transactions as a PDF. Is that the same thing?

No. Santander’s Download transactions help offers Excel, Quicken, Adobe Acrobat (PDF) and Microsoft Money, for all available transactions or everything since your last download, up to 600 transactions at a time. That is a list of transactions, not the statement, and we have not tested one. The statement is the document with the account summary, the Important messages and the table on page three, and that is the one we read.

Will the cheque numbers come through?

Yes. Santander prints each cheque as PAYMENT BY CHEQUE WITH SERIAL NO and the six-digit serial number, and we keep that whole line as the description. The number travels into the export with it, ready to tick off against the cheque book stubs or the cheques the council approved.

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