https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/ Recent content on Bank Statement Converter Blog Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Sun, 02 Aug 2026 11:37:00 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2026-08-02-why-are-all-amounts-negative/ Sun, 02 Aug 2026 11:37:00 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2026-08-02-why-are-all-amounts-negative/ A few days ago I got this email from a customer. Something about all the amounts coming out as negative. I converted their PDF. PDF Sample Converted Sample The customer was right, all amounts were coming through as negative. Pretty weird. Interestingly the column headers end with minus sign characters. I then opened up the PDF in PDFSnake to see how the text is encoded. Let’s look at how the values “$110. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2025-09-18-psst-want-to-see-a-cool-bug/ Wed, 18 Sep 2024 17:25:00 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2025-09-18-psst-want-to-see-a-cool-bug/ Yesterday I was going through error reports and I saw this email. At first I was kind of annoyed, often users like to merge multiple PDFs into one large PDF to abuse my free plan and convert more than one PDF a day for free. Then I looked at the PDF and thought “Ah actually this is supposed to convert correctly even if the PDF has been merged into one mega PDF”. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2024-08-02-when-you-dont-know-how-your-app-works/ Sat, 03 Aug 2024 16:13:00 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2024-08-02-when-you-dont-know-how-your-app-works/ On Monday morning I was going through emails and see one from a user telling me the forgot password form isn’t working. That’s weird, it’s the kind of thing that doesn’t really break. I try resetting their password for them using the form, the form errors out. That’s weird. It turns out this user’s email address was capitalised, and the query code that fetches a user by email address sends in the lowercase value of their email. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2024-07-02-extracting-text-you-cant-see/ Tue, 02 Jul 2024 08:28:00 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2024-07-02-extracting-text-you-cant-see/ A few months ago I got an email from a customer in Dubai asking me to help extract transactions from a PDF bank statement. This is pretty normal. I get about ten of these emails a day. I had a look at the PDF and thought: “Damn, banks are even stupider than I thought.” The statement was basically an excel file, exported out into a PDF. It’s so annoying when people do that, because most people would rather have the Excel/CSV file. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2024-03-30-bank-statement-converter-book/ Sat, 30 Mar 2024 12:02:00 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2024-03-30-bank-statement-converter-book/ I have written a book about how I coded Bank Statement Converter. You can read it for free here. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2023-03-02-february-sales-numbers/ Thu, 02 Mar 2023 13:35:00 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2023-03-02-february-sales-numbers/ Plumpbird: February is the shortest month of the year. Did you make any damn money? Net Volume January 2023 - $59390 HKD February 2023 - $57878 HKD A bit of a drop, but February has three fewer days than January, so you could chalk it up as a win. Monthly Recurring Revenue January 2023 - $50408 HKD February 2023 - $57820 HKD A very nice increase. This means MRR has now exceeded $7000 USD. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2023-02-01-revenue-numbers/ Wed, 01 Feb 2023 14:00:00 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2023-02-01-revenue-numbers/ Plumbird: It’s been a while since you’ve shared sales numbers. How’s the Bank Statement Converter doing? It’s been pretty good. Net Volume I like this number, because it’s the number of dollars that go into my bank account. November - $53,531 HKD December - $55,525 HKD January - $59,390 HKD It’s a nice steady increase. The best month we’ve had was $59,507 in August 2022. That month was a bit of an outlier because I charged one client $40,000 HKD for some one off work. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-11-01-october-sales-review/ Tue, 01 Nov 2022 00:28:00 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-11-01-october-sales-review/ Normally this blog goes out on a Monday, but since the month ended on a Monday I figured it would be better to wait a day. Let’s go through October’s stats. In September we brought in $46,736 HKD and this month we brought in $46,846 HKD. That’s not very much growth! We ended October with MRR at $40,455. We ended September with MRR of $37,521. Active subscribers has gone from 212 to 225. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-10-24-5000-monthly-recurring-revenue/ Mon, 24 Oct 2022 00:28:00 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-10-24-5000-monthly-recurring-revenue/ On October 21st monthly recurring revenue (MRR) exceeded the $5000 USD mark. We hit $4000 MRR on September 12th, so it took only 40 days to earn the last $1000 MRR. If MRR continues to grow at this speed, we should hit $6000 MRR on December 1st 2022. Plumpbirds: We’re getting tired, we don’t want any more MRR. Last Week’s Goals ✅ 1. Contact 100 users I emailed every user who signed up in the previous week. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-10-17-referral-feature/ Mon, 17 Oct 2022 20:54:00 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-10-17-referral-feature/ Last Week’s Goals Plumpbird: Set some harder goals this week you lazy jerk! ✅ 1. Contact 100 users I contacted more than 100 users last week and scheduled the emails to arrive at 10 AM in whatever timezone the user was in. Sadly only four of the users replied. Some users I emailed had signed up several months ago. It might be better to email users who recently signed up. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-10-10-sitting-on-ants-nest/ Mon, 10 Oct 2022 01:35:00 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-10-10-sitting-on-ants-nest/ Bad News Last week I walked from Tung Chung to Mui Wo, which is section #1 and #2 of the Lantau Trail. At the end of the trail I sat down in what turned out to be an ants nest. The ants started biting me it was pretty painful, but I got up and brushed them off. This taught me an important start-up lesson. Do not sit on a nest of ants, but if you do, just brush them off. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-10-03-october-sales-review/ Mon, 03 Oct 2022 09:16:30 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-10-03-october-sales-review/ September Sales Another month has gone by, let’s take a look at the monthly revenue graph. Oh no, revenue went down! In August we brought in $62,596 HKD and in September we brought in $46,736 HKD. Not great news, but it’s actually okay. This is because 60% of August’s revenue came from one off work for a single customer. The Monthly Recurring Revenue graph is looking excellent. It increased from $21,701 HKD in August to $37,481 HKD in September. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-09-26-translating-the-front-end/ Mon, 26 Sep 2022 14:25:00 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-09-26-translating-the-front-end/ Here’s what I got up to last week. Becoming a Xero App Partner I had a look at building a Xero integration for Bank Statement Converter. I created an account, poked around and looked at the API documentation. It seemed like a feasible idea. Then I looked at the approval process. It seems like I would have to build a custom app for two customers, and then would be eligible to create an app store app that anyone could purchase. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-09-20-plumping-mrr-from-1000-to-4000-usd/ Tue, 20 Sep 2022 11:16:00 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-09-20-plumping-mrr-from-1000-to-4000-usd/ Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is the most important metric when running a SaaS company. You want your MRR to be as plump as possible. On February 13th MRR was at $1000. Last week MRR exceeded $4000. What happened across the past seven months? Why did MRR increase so much in the last week? Letting Time Pass A big part of it was just letting time pass and steadily getting more users. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-09-19-when-customers-cant-succeed/ Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:25:00 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-09-19-when-customers-cant-succeed/ I don’t know when this started, but at some point in my life some jerk has gone and renamed “Customer Support” to “Customer Success”. It’s a pretty crappy name because it doesn’t really mean anything when you read it. You have to be in the know. You have to know that “Customer Success” means “Customer Support”, which in turn means replying to messages, emails and phone calls from customers who have some problem or question. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-09-16-wave-based-security/ Fri, 16 Sep 2022 14:24:00 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-09-16-wave-based-security/ I usually work on this app from a shared office that I’ve been renting since January 2021. The rule is, everyone is supposed to check in at the reception desk in the lobby before going up to the higher floors. After a while I decided to skip checking in at reception. This, as you can imagine, was really great. Walk into a building, walk into the lift, go up the lift, sit down at your desk. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-07-18-hours-work-behind-simple-feature/ Mon, 18 Jul 2022 13:27:00 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-07-18-hours-work-behind-simple-feature/ Since I started this website in April 2021, I knew users would upload PDF files that were password protected. I figured it would be too annoying to do the work to support these PDFs so I put it off. Recently a user asked me to support password protected PDFs, so I did it. It’s a simple feature, and it works pretty well. I spent all of yesterday working on it and pushed it into production at 2:32 AM this morning. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-07-13-json-api/ Wed, 13 Jul 2022 17:05:00 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-07-13-json-api/ Postman Collection Download 1. Get the Authorization Token Go to https://bankstatementconverter.com/ in Google Chrome Login Hit F12 to open up the developer tools Click on the “Application” tab On the left panel click on “Storage” -> “Local Storage” -> “https://bankstatementconverter.com/" You should see a key called “bsc-authToken” and a corresponding value. The value is the Authorization Token. Copy the value. 2. Upload PDF API Method: POST URL: https://api2.bankstatementconverter.com/api/v1/BankStatement Headers: { Authorization: AUTH_TOKEN } Body: Multipart Form Data Request Headers Request Body Response Body 3. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-05-09-hsbc-mole-whacking-development/ Mon, 09 May 2022 13:23:00 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-05-09-hsbc-mole-whacking-development/ Last week a customer asked me to help him process a few hundred of his documents. He had PDFs for several bank accounts going back to 2018. I had a look a documents arranged a price and then got to work processing his documents. My idea was to run it through Bank Statement Converter’s (BSC) PDF to CSV processor. However a few errors occurred. BSC has a generic algorithm for detecting transaction records in a PDF file. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-04-21-what-year-is-it/ Thu, 21 Apr 2022 15:22:00 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-04-21-what-year-is-it/ Lately I’ve been getting a lot of complaints that the year is wrong in Bank Statement Converter’s resulting CSV. At first when I got these complaints I thought “What the hell you talking about? All we do is find the transaction data and then write it out to a CSV file. How can the year be wrong?”. Let’s walk through an what’s going on with one of my HSBC bank statements. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-03-31-automatically-get-your-bank-transactions/ Thu, 31 Mar 2022 15:15:14 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-03-31-automatically-get-your-bank-transactions/ The other day I had a bit of revelation about what problem Bank Statement Converter solves. The obvious answer seems to be “it solves the problem of extracting transaction data from PDF bank statements”. That’s true, but you could also say it solves a more general problem. “It gives user access to their bank transaction data”. However, it’s a bit of a pain to use. To get your 2021 transaction data you need to: https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-02-25-zero-to-one-thousand-mrr/ Fri, 25 Feb 2022 11:00:35 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2022-02-25-zero-to-one-thousand-mrr/ A few weeks ago the BankStatementConverter (BSC) exceed $1000 in Monthly Recurring Revneue (MRR). I figured you lot would be interested to hear the story $0 MRR, March to July 2021 I got the idea to build BSC to help users process PDFs. I spent about a week playing around in Kotlin to see if my idea was feasible, it was. Soon after I meet up with a friend for beers and tell him my idea. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2021-10-30-detecting-transaction-table-headers/ Sat, 30 Oct 2021 16:25:00 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2021-10-30-detecting-transaction-table-headers/ This is the second part in a series of blog posts where I explain how Bank Statement Converter works. In the previous article I talked about how I extract each character and its bounding box from a PDF. In this article I’ll talk about how I use the characters and bounding boxes to deteect the headers of the transaction table. val pageRegion = Rectangle(0f, 0f, page.cropBox.width, page.cropBox.height) val lines = LineExtractor(page). https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2021-10-05-extracting-text-and-bounding-boxes-from-pdf/ Tue, 05 Oct 2021 13:37:00 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2021-10-05-extracting-text-and-bounding-boxes-from-pdf/ This is part one of a series of blog posts where I explain how BankStatementConverter works. In this post I’m going to explain the code that figures out the bounding boxes and other attributes of characters on a page. Lots of this code was lifted from DrawPrintTextLocations and PDFTextStripper. First thing we do is load the PDF file using PDFBox and then we process the document page by page. The PDFs are processed page by page because we don’t run out of memory, most documents are less than ten pages long, but there are documents out there that are over 10,000 pages long, if we tried to load all the data from a large document into memory we would quickly run out and crash our app. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2021-10-04analysing-my-hsbc-credit-card-and-bank-statements/ Mon, 04 Oct 2021 10:55:03 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2021-10-04analysing-my-hsbc-credit-card-and-bank-statements/ Originally I wanted to analyse my HSBC bank statements from 2014. 2014 was a great year for me, I started off the year by launching a new app, joined a game development company and rented an apartment with a friend. Unfortunately my 2014 bank statements from HSBC’s internet banking are no longer available, it seems they only go back a few years. So let’s go through my 2015 bank statements instead. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2021-09-27-five-ways-i-handled-outofmemoryerrors/ Mon, 27 Sep 2021 11:22:12 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2021-09-27-five-ways-i-handled-outofmemoryerrors/ I use Grafana to create graphs that show me various business and performance metrics for Bank Statement Converter. One of the graphs I created tracks the number of Internal Server Errors the server returns to its clients. I do this by writing a record into the database whenever a 500 is sent to the client. This graph has been really helpful for ironing out bugs I didn’t anticipate. Last Thursday at 12:55 AM HKT my servers started throwing Java’s infamous OutOfMemoryErrors. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2021-09-24-nab-bank-statement-review/ Fri, 24 Sep 2021 10:53:45 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2021-09-24-nab-bank-statement-review/ The lowercase friendly NAB logo reminds me of Jeb Bush’s 2016 ‘Jeb!’ logo National Australia Bank Formed in 1982 after the merging of National Bank of Australalasia and the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney. The 21st largest bank by market capitalisation. They have an Irish subsidary called Danske Banke, which was formerly known as National Irish Bank. Sounds like a pretty good bank, but how good are their PDFs? We will answer that by reviewing one of their home loan statements. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2021-09-22-hsbc-credit-card-review/ Wed, 22 Sep 2021 09:37:14 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2021-09-22-hsbc-credit-card-review/ Are the people in this building good at making PDFs? I’ve seen quite a few statements when helping customers get through issues converting bank statements. A lot of bank statements follow a logical structured format that is easy for a human to read and easy for an algorithm to extract data from. You’d think it’s something that would normalise into a standard format, banks would look at statements from other banks and copy the bank with the best statements. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2021-09-21-why-i-created-bank-statement-converter/ Tue, 21 Sep 2021 13:52:35 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2021-09-21-why-i-created-bank-statement-converter/ I own a limited liability company in Hong Kong called Dragon King Creation Limited. The company has no employees, I’m the sole director and I own 100% of the shares of the company. I created the company in 2015 to manage the revenues from my Android and iPhone application sales. The company doesn’t make a lot of money, but it’s still officially a company. Every year limited companies in Hong Kong must go through an audit. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2021-09-03-extract-tables-from-pdf/ Fri, 03 Sep 2021 15:25:59 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2021-09-03-extract-tables-from-pdf/ Getting data from a PDF file into an Excel file is a major pain in the ass. A lot of people resort to manually copying it. If you want to automate the conversion follow the steps below Go to bankstatementconverter.com Click the Convert a PDF button Select the PDF you want to convert Wait for it to finish uploading Press the inspect button You should be taken to a page where you can see the PDF you uploaded. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2021-08-30-twitter-oauth-with-ktor/ Mon, 30 Aug 2021 16:15:40 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2021-08-30-twitter-oauth-with-ktor/ I’ve been working on a new project that requires lots of different social sign in providers. This meant I needed to learn what OAuth is and how to create the APIs to communicate with OAuth providers like Facebook, Google, Github and… Twitter. The first three providers were very easy to work with, Twitter was not. I spent about five hours reading Twitter’s documentation, going through blog post and libraries and writing code. https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2021-08-24-convert-scanned-bank-statements-to-excel/ Tue, 24 Aug 2021 15:31:34 +0800 https://bankstatementconverter.com/blog/posts/2021-08-24-convert-scanned-bank-statements-to-excel/ A few weeks ago I got an email from a user in Australia, it read “I uploaded a bank statement and nothing happens How do I see the converted file?”. I took a look at my Grafana dashboards and figured out this user had uploaded an image based PDF, probably a scanned bank statement. I’ve replied to quite a few users telling us that scanned documents don’t work. I fished out a reply from my sent folder and sent it to this user.