The IRS does not ask you to send your bank statements with your return. Schedule C asks for totals: your gross receipts, and your expenses by category. If you are a sole proprietor or the only owner of an LLC, those totals usually live in a year of bank statements, and the statements often arrive as PDFs.
Here is how to turn those PDFs into one spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet into the totals.
1. Get the statements for the year
For most sole proprietors, the tax year is the calendar year, January 1 to December 31. A bank's statement cycle often does not line up with it: a statement can run from December 16 to January 15. So download every statement that has any days in the year, usually thirteen, the first and last only partly in the year.
Get the statements of every account the business runs through, checking and savings. Some banks let you download recent activity as a CSV file, but for older months the PDF statement is often all you have.
2. Convert them, with full dates
A statement often prints its dates without the year, as "03/04", and puts the year in the heading. That is fine to read and useless to filter.
- Drop the PDF in on our home page, and we show you its first page converted before you sign up.
- Sign up with your email address to download it. You do not need a card. The free trial converts up to 5 pages of a statement, 15 pages in all.
- From your list of statements, select (US dates) beside the Xero / QuickBooks download. You get this file on the free trial and on the Standard and Plus plans. It is the easiest one to total:
| Date | Description | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| 03/02/2026 | ORIG CO NAME:PAYMENT PROCESSOR CO ENTRY DESCR:TRANSFER SEC:CCD | 1840.00 |
| 03/04/2026 | Zelle payment from A CLIENT LLC | 650.00 |
| 03/05/2026 | CARD PURCHASE 03/04 OFFICE SUPPLY STORE | -42.18 |
| 03/09/2026 | ACH DEBIT INSURANCE CO PPD | -96.00 |
The rows above are an example, not a real statement.
- Every date is in full, with its year, month first.
- Money in is positive and money out is negative, in one column.
- We leave out lines that move no money, such as an opening balance.
Some US statements list deposits, withdrawals and checks in separate sections, with no running balance. We cannot convert those yet. Because you see the first page converted before you sign up, you find out before you spend anything.
3. Put the year in one sheet
Open the first file in Excel and paste the rows of each of the others under it, keeping one header row. Then keep only the tax year:
- Select the header row, then Data > Filter.
- On the Date column, choose Date Filters > Between, from 01/01 to 12/31 of the year.
- Copy the rows that are left to a new sheet.
Because each statement starts where the last one ended, nothing is counted twice. If you downloaded an overlapping statement, look for the same transactions on the same dates and delete one copy.
4. Mark each row, then total it
Add a column called Category and give each row a name. For expenses, the names on Schedule C itself save you a step later: Advertising, Car and truck expenses, Contract labor, Insurance, Legal and professional services, Office expense, Rent or lease, Supplies, Taxes and licenses, Travel, Utilities and so on.
Some money that comes in is not income. Mark these rows so they drop out of the totals:
- Transfer: money moved between your own accounts.
- Owner: money you put into the business, or took out for yourself.
- Loan: the money a lender paid in. Your repayments are not an expense either, though the interest can be.
- Personal: anything that has nothing to do with the business.
A payment processor such as Stripe, Square or PayPal usually pays in your sales less its fees. So your gross receipts can be more than the deposits, and the fees are an expense. The processor's own reports give the gross figures.
Then total each category, either with a formula, where Category is column D:
=SUMIF(D:D, "Supplies", C:C)
or with a pivot table: select the data, then Insert > PivotTable, and drag Category to Rows and Amount to Values.
Expenses come out negative, because they left the account. Use the figures without the minus sign on the form.
What ACH, PPD and POS mean helps when a description is only a code.
5. Check the year adds up
Before you trust the totals, check the conversion:
- Every statement's Excel download has a Ledger column that checks each
balance against the row before it. Filter it for
break, and compare those rows with the PDF. Why a balance breaks explains what to look for. - For each account, the year's amounts added together should equal the balance at the end of December 31 less the balance at the start of January 1.
Keep the records
The IRS says to keep the records behind a return for 3 years in most cases, and longer in some, such as 6 years if you leave out more than 25% of your gross income. Keep the PDFs from your bank, not only the spreadsheet, because the PDF is the record. The IRS has the rules.
This guide is about getting the numbers out of your statements. What counts as income and which expenses you can deduct is for the IRS's Schedule C instructions or your tax preparer.