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An offline alternative to cloud bank statement converters

A bank statement shows who you pay, where you shop, what you earn. Before you give it to any website, it is worth knowing whether the file leaves your device.

What cloud converters do

Many online tools that convert or categorize statements work by sending your file to their server, processing it there, and sending a result back. That is a normal way to build a service, and some of them say clearly how long they keep files and who can see them. Others say little. The point is not that every one is unsafe; it is that you are trusting the policy, not the design. For a PDF, a server-side approach is often the only practical one. For a CSV it is not required, because a CSV is plain text that a web page can read on your machine.

How to check any tool in two minutes

1. Open the tool's page and press F12 in your browser to open developer tools, then the Network tab.
2. Load a harmless test file (a few made-up lines, not your real statement).
3. Watch the Network tab. If a request carrying your file appears, it was uploaded. If nothing is sent when you drop the file, it stayed in the page.
4. Read the privacy policy for retention: how long, who has access, can you delete it.

You can do exactly this on our categorizer. We also set the page's Content Security Policy so the app can only contact one payment-processor address (Dodo Payments), and only when you enter a license key. You can read this in the page source and on our privacy page.

What an in-browser tool does

• Reads your CSV inside your browser tab and keeps it in memory. Closing the tab discards it.
• Stores only your own category rules and merchant names in your browser (localStorage), never the transactions.
• Has no account, no analytics and no third-party scripts.
• Once the page has loaded it does not need the network, except to activate a license key once.

What it cannot do

• It reads CSV only. It does not read PDF statements, so it is no replacement for a converter if the PDF is all you have. Many banks offer a CSV download; our export guides list the ones we could check against the bank's own help page.
• Categories are automatic guesses. On our own small test (37 lines from public sample files) they matched our hand labels about 3 times in 4 on formats the tool had not been tuned on, and only about 3 in 5 for lines that belong in a real category. You need to review them.
• We have tested public sample files from about 25 banks and apps, mostly European, a few US, none from the UAE. We have not tested a wide range of real customer exports.
• No currency conversion: each currency is totalled separately.

Source and honesty note

This is our own explanation, not a bank page. We do not name or rate other products here; check any tool yourself with the steps above. We make this tool, so read our claims with that in mind.

Then categorize it free, offline

Try it on a small sample first. The free version takes one file and the latest 3 months of it.

Categories are automatic guesses; check them before using the numbers for tax. CSV only, no PDF.