Guides
UK bank statement formats, and where they trip people up.
No two banks export the same shape. Some put money out as a negative, some give it its own column, and one of them writes the date backwards. Here is what each one actually produces — written from the code that reads them.
The three things that go wrong
Almost every bad import is one of these.
Which way is money out?
Three conventions are in use: one signed column (-45.00), a
Paid In / Paid Out pair, and positive numbers with the direction implied
elsewhere. Read the third as the first and every expense becomes income.
The trial balance still balances — it is describing a different business.
Which way round is the date?
05/01/2025 is 5 January here and 1 May in a US-formatted
export. Get it wrong and a handful of transactions quietly move between
months — or across a year end, which moves them between accounting periods.
Is it really all sterling?
A EUR line in a Revolut or Wise export is a number like any other. Read as sterling, €1,200 enters the books as £1,200, the journal balances, the statement reconciles against a total that is equally wrong, and no screen anywhere suggests a problem.
Read by column name, without a dedicated parser
The rest, and what they call things.
These import cleanly today. A named parser would buy a correct bank badge and some protection from the bank changing its format — not the ability to read it.
Santander
Credits / Debits, and the “previous statement balance” opening row is skipped.
Tide
Paid In / Paid Out.
Nationwide
Paid In / Paid Out.
Halifax
Debit / Credit.
Co-operative
Standard debit and credit columns.
Revolut Business
Reads, but see the fee and currency notes below.
Per bank
How to export, and what you get.
FAQ
The questions worth asking before you import a year.
Which UK banks can Entrio read?
Seven have a dedicated parser: Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, NatWest, Monzo, Starling and Mettle. Beyond those a generic reader matches columns by name, which covers Santander, Tide, Nationwide, Halifax, Co-operative and most others — a named parser mainly buys a correct bank badge and protection from format changes, not new capability. The honest answer to “which banks are unsupported” is: very few.
Do you read PDF statements?
No, and not by accident. Extracting figures from a PDF is guesswork about layout, and on a year of transactions that guesswork lands in the trial balance. CSV and Excel are exact. Every UK bank worth the name exports one or the other.
Does Entrio accept Excel as well as CSV?
Yes — .xlsx is converted on upload. Legacy .xls is refused at the form rather than half-read, which is the safer failure: an error you can see beats a file that imports with the wrong columns.
How are dates read?
05/01/2025 is read as 5 January, the UK interpretation. It is the right default here and the wrong one for a US-formatted file, so a file exported with American dates needs checking before import.
What about foreign currency lines?
They are detected and flagged, never converted. A EUR line read as sterling puts €1,200 into the books as £1,200, the journal still balances, and nothing looks wrong — so Entrio names the currencies it found on the face of the report and in the export checks instead of guessing an exchange rate.
What is still not handled?
Separate fee columns. Revolut Business and Wise put the transaction in one column and the charge in another, and that fee is a real allowable expense that does not currently enter the books. Starling and Tide do the same on FX. It is on the list; until then those rows want a manual look.
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