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St.George statement to CSV

Drop the St.George PDF as you downloaded it. It is converted on your computer, and we check every row against the running balance, compare the totals with the ones St.George printed and check that the rows carry the opening balance to the closing one. Then download it for your accounting software or a spreadsheet.

Getting the PDF out of St.George

  1. Log on to the Corporate eStatements Portal at stgeorge.com.au/estatements-portal with your User ID, your password and the One Time PIN sent to the mobile number recorded in Business Banking Online.
  2. The home screen lists only statements issued in the last 30 days. For older ones, use Search eStatements with a date range, or a predefined range by fiscal year.
  3. Download the PDFs, up to five at a time.

Only one eligible Administrator registered in Business Banking Online can use the Portal, and they see every eligible account the business owns.

Business savings and transaction accounts have had eStatements in the Portal since April 2024, each kept for 7 years from the end of its statement period. Statements from before then are not there.

An accountant who used to receive duplicate paper statements stops receiving them once the account is in the Portal, and the Administrator downloads and passes them on instead.

From St.George’s own help: Corporate eStatements Portal FAQs.

What a St.George statement looks like, and what we do with it

Under the heading Statement of Account and the product name, page one sets the Account Summary across a single line, then begins Transaction Details under Date, Transaction Description, Debit, Credit and Balance $. Balances are plain figures, and rows run oldest first from an OPENING BALANCE row to a dated CLOSING BALANCE, with ATM withdrawals and card purchases each taking two or three lines. Each statement fills three or four pages and ends with an Interest Details section after the table.

Rows carry no year, written 12 OCT, and the period is set in figures with "to" between its ends, running from the 12th of one month to the 11th of the next.
Neither says whether the period is day first, so we take that from the rest of the page: a card purchase prints its own date in figures, day first with a two-digit year, and the period read month first would end before it began. Each row then takes its year from the period, so a January row on a statement that opened in December lands in the new year.
A card purchase runs over three lines: VISA PURCHASE with the day it was made, the merchant and its town, then EFFECTIVE DATE with the day and month run together, as in 15OCT. The row itself is dated the day it was posted.
We join the three lines into one description and keep the posting date, the day the balance moved. The payee comes out as the merchant and town from the middle line.
Each page ends "SUB TOTAL CARRIED FORWARD TO NEXT PAGE" and the next opens "SUB TOTAL CARRIED FORWARD FROM PREVIOUS PAGE", both with the balance beside them.
Neither is a transaction, so we leave both out, and the running balance carries across the page unbroken.
The Account Summary sets Opening Balance + Total Credits - Total Debits = Closing Balance across one line, signs and all.
We check our money in and money out against it, to the cent, and that the rows carry the opening balance to the closing one.

What this page is based on

Six consecutive monthly statements of a company’s Freedom Business account, from late 2018 into 2019, copied into a bundle of documents with a reference stamped on every page. Each passed all three checks, with between 6 and 29 transactions apiece. Opened together, the six chained into one account, every statement starting where the last stopped, although every one of them runs from the 12th to the 11th rather than by calendar month.

Our St.George statements predate the Corporate eStatements Portal, which began holding business account statements in April 2024, so a PDF downloaded from the Portal is one we have yet to see. Personal accounts and St.George credit cards are untested as well.

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

Questions

My St.George statements have a reference stamped on every page. Will they convert?

Ours were exactly that. Each page carried a document reference above St.George’s own header and a bundle page number at its foot, and neither found its way into a transaction. The checks are what tell you a copy is whole: a page dropped from the bundle breaks the running balance between the pages either side of it.

Can our accountant still get the statements once we use the Portal?

Not by post. St.George’s Portal FAQs say a third party who received duplicate paper statements stops receiving them once the account is added, and the Administrator downloads and passes them on. The Administrator can save the PDFs straight from the Portal, five at a time, and either of you can convert them.

Why does my statement run from the 12th to the 11th?

That is the account’s statement cycle. St.George’s own help says you find yours by looking at a previous statement’s Statement Period, and gives the example 01/03/2006 to 30/04/2006, written day first just as ours were. Each row keeps its own date in your file, so you can still reconcile by calendar month in your accounting software.

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