People’s Bank Statement to Excel: End Manual Data Entry

If you have a People’s Bank statement in PDF format and need the transactions in Excel, manually entering everything can take a lot of time.

This can be especially frustrating when the statement is a scanned copy from a client. Dates, descriptions, debit and credit amounts, and balances may not stay neatly separated when you try to move the information into a spreadsheet.

People’s Bank provides electronic statements through its internet banking services. Its current corporate internet banking service also lists statement downloads in PDF, TXT, CSV and MT940 formats. 

But accountants and businesses can still receive statements as PDFs, printed documents or scanned copies, depending on how the statement was obtained and shared.

People’s Bank statement to Excel

If you search for a People’s Bank statement to Excel or People’s Bank Sri Lanka PDF converter, you’ll find different tools for turning bank statements into structured transaction data.

The basic process is simple: upload the statement, extract the transactions, and organise them into rows that can be opened in Excel or used in another accounting system.

The difficulty comes when the source document is not a clean, digital PDF.

A selectable-text PDF can usually be read directly. A scanned statement is different because the transaction information is stored as an image. The converter first has to recognise the text and then determine which figures belong to which transaction columns.

Why People’s Bank statements can take time to clean up

Copying a statement directly into Excel might seem like the easiest option.

With a longer statement, you may find yourself fixing:

• Dates appearing in the wrong format
• Transaction descriptions breaking across lines
• Debit and credit amounts moving into the wrong columns
• Decimal points being read incorrectly
• Transaction rows not lining up
• Scanned pages that cannot be copied directly

For a short statement, these problems may only take a few minutes to fix.

For several months of transactions or multiple client accounts, manually checking and cleaning the spreadsheet can become another bookkeeping task.

What if the People’s Bank statement is scanned?

A scanned bank statement is essentially an image inside a PDF. Normal copy and paste may not work because there is no selectable transaction text.

OCR can read the information from scanned pages and turn it into structured data. But recognising the characters is only part of the job.

A financial document can contain similar-looking numbers, amounts with decimal points, and transactions that need to remain in the correct order.

A missed transaction may also be difficult to notice if you only look at the extracted rows individually.

This is why checking the extracted transactions against the statement’s running balance can provide another level of verification.

Convert a People’s Bank statement with Banksheet

Banksheet is designed to convert bank statements into structured transaction data, including scanned PDFs with skewed pages and poor contrast.

People’s Bank is one of the banks currently supported by Banksheet.

You upload the People’s Bank statement and Banksheet extracts the transactions into structured data. It then checks each extracted row against the statement’s own running balance.

The basic process is:

Upload the People’s Bank statement → Extract the transactions → Check the balances → Export to Excel or CSV

Instead of manually entering every transaction, you can review the extracted data and work with the resulting file.

Balance verification matters

Getting the transaction text into Excel is only part of the process.

For example, if one transaction is missed during extraction, the rows around it may still look correct. The problem may only become obvious when the running balance no longer matches the balance shown on the original statement.

Banksheet checks the extracted rows against the statement’s running balance to help identify this type of problem.

This is particularly useful when working with longer statements where checking every transaction manually can take considerable time.

Excel or CSV: which should you use?

Excel is useful when you want to review, sort, filter or edit the transactions.

CSV can be more convenient when you need to move transaction data into another accounting or bookkeeping system.

People’s Bank’s corporate internet banking service already supports statement downloads in CSV as well as PDF, TXT and MT940.

If you already have a clean CSV from the bank, there may be no need to convert it. A PDF or scanned statement is where a PDF-to-Excel or PDF-to-CSV workflow becomes more useful.

Try it on a People’s Bank statement

If you have a People’s Bank PDF that you don’t want to enter into Excel manually, you can try Banksheet.

The free plan currently includes 100 pages, all export formats, and no credit card is required.

Upload your People’s Bank statement, check the extracted transactions, and export the result to Excel or CSV.