Convert a General Ledger PDF to Excel and CSV

Why a general ledger is hard to convert from a PDF

A ledger is organized by account, and the account is a heading, not a field on each row. Copy the page into a spreadsheet and the transactions lose the account they belong to. Rebuilding that link by hand across hundreds of rows is slow and easy to get wrong.

Names and memos wrap. A long vendor name or a note can run onto a second line, and a basic converter turns the second line into a row of its own. The sheet then fills with half rows that break every filter.

Sub-accounts are indented. A parent account and the accounts under it differ only by how far the text is pushed to the right, which disappears when the text is copied out of the PDF.

Subtotals and totals are printed inside the data. Each account ends with a total, and the report often repeats headers and running totals on every page. Pasted as they are, these lines inflate your sums.

About general ledger reports

• A general ledger report is the detailed record behind a company's financial statements. It is printed from accounting software for a month, a quarter or a year.
• Accountants use it to trace a number on a financial statement back to the entries that produced it, and auditors ask for it to test those entries.
• Reports from different software look different, and the same software can print several variants. Some are long enough to run to hundreds of pages.

How we convert it

• The reader finds the table headers and the column positions on the page.
• Each row is cut by position, so wrapped text stays in its own cell.
• Every column in the document becomes its own column in the CSV.
• The preview shows the first rows free, and you can adjust the column positions if a column is misread, before you convert.
• Headers and row counts can vary between runs, so look over the preview.

Every conversion also checks each page against the page image, and lines that continue a wrapped description are not counted as extra transactions.

The result is a CSV with Date, Description and Amount columns (plus Balance when the statement has one) that opens in Excel and imports into Google Sheets and QuickBooks. You pay per transaction, not per page. See plans and pricing.

What people do with the file

Audit support. Load the ledger into a spreadsheet and filter by account, vendor or amount to find the entries an auditor asked about. A sheet is faster to search than a document of many pages.

Cleanup after a software move. When a company changes accounting systems, the old ledger often exists only as PDFs. A CSV gives the new bookkeeper history that can be sorted and compared.

Variance work. Put two periods side by side in one workbook and use a pivot table to see which accounts moved the most.

Lender and investor requests. Send a filtered sheet with only the accounts they asked about, instead of the whole report.

Good to know

• General ledger reports are read by the column-based engine. Headers and row counts can vary between runs, so check the preview before you convert.
• If a column is misread, adjust the column positions in the preview.

Questions