Bank Statement
A bank statement is the document a bank or card issuer provides listing a period's transactions along with its beginning and ending balance, used to verify a statement import.
In short
The source document behind every import. BalanceMCP doesn't just take the transactions on faith — it adds the beginning balance to every transaction and checks the total matches the statement's own stated ending balance, flagging the import if it doesn't.
Also called: account statement, card statement
A bank statement is the actual document a bank or credit card issuer produces for a period — a PDF, a CSV, sometimes plain text — listing every transaction alongside the account's beginning and ending balance for that stretch of time. It's the source of truth a statement import is checked against, not just a list of transactions taken on faith.
The arithmetic check is the point of supplying the statement's own beginning and ending balance during an import: BalanceMCP adds the beginning balance to every extracted transaction and verifies the sum equals the stated ending balance. When it doesn't, the import is flagged rather than silently accepted, since a mismatch usually means the extraction missed a row or picked up an extra one.
A real, common cause of a mismatched statement is a transaction that spans a page break in a PDF — split awkwardly across two pages during extraction, or dropped entirely. Re-checking the source document around any page boundary is often where a flagged discrepancy traces back to.
A statement's transaction amounts and balances need to be entered in the ledger's own signed convention, not necessarily how they're printed — a credit card's beginning and ending balance both need to be negative, since they represent money owed, even if the printed statement shows them as plain positive figures.
What people get wrong
- Missing a transaction that spans a page break during PDF extraction — a common, specific cause of a flagged, unbalanced import.
- Entering a statement's printed figures verbatim instead of translating them into the ledger's signed convention — a credit card's balances need to be negative.
- Treating a flagged import as something to ignore rather than a signal to re-check the source document before trusting the numbers downstream.
Common questions
- What happens if the numbers on my statement don't add up after import?
- The import still happens, but it comes back flagged with the discrepancy amount — usually a sign that a row was missed or duplicated during extraction, worth checking against the source document.
- Do I enter my credit card statement's numbers exactly as printed?
- No — the ledger's convention needs a card's beginning and ending balances entered as negative numbers, since they represent money owed, even if the statement itself prints them as plain positive figures.
Machine-readable: /api/knowledge/concept:bank-statement