HMRC does not ask you to send your bank statements with a Self Assessment return. It asks for totals: your income, and for self-employment or property, your allowable expenses. For most people those totals live in a year of bank statements, and the statements arrive as PDFs.
This guide turns those PDFs into one spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet into the totals.
1. Get the statements for the tax year
The tax year runs from 6 April to 5 April. A bank's statements rarely line up with it, so download every statement that has any days in the year: usually thirteen monthly statements, the first and last only partly in the year.
Download them from your online banking as PDFs. If you have more than one account the business runs through, get each account's statements.
2. Convert them, with full dates
A statement often prints its dates without the year, as "04 Jun", and puts the year in the page heading. That is fine to read and useless to filter.
Upload each statement to BankPDFtoXLS. Page one converts free, with no email and no card, so you can check the columns first. Then, from your list of statements, download the Xero / QuickBooks file. It is the easiest one to total:
| Date | Description | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| 03/06/2024 | FPI A CLIENT LTD INVOICE 114 | 1200.00 |
| 05/06/2024 | DD PHONE COMPANY | -32.50 |
| 07/06/2024 | CARD PAYMENT STATIONERY SHOP | -18.99 |
| 10/06/2024 | FPO HOME INSURANCE | -41.00 |
The rows above are an example, not a real statement.
- Every date is in full, with its year, day first.
- Money in is positive and money out is negative, in one column.
- Lines that are not transactions, such as "Balance brought forward", are left out.
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 06/04 of the first year to 05/04 of the next.
- 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, such as an interim one, 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 one word: Sales, Phone, Insurance, Personal and so on. Mark payments that have nothing to do with the business or the property as Personal, so they drop out of the totals.
Then total each category, either with a formula, where Category is column D:
=SUMIF(D:D, "Phone", 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 return.
What DD, BGC and FPI 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 closing balance on 5 April less the opening balance on 6 April.
Keep the records
HMRC says how long to keep the records behind a return: for the self-employed, at least five years after the 31 January deadline for that tax year. Keep the PDFs from your bank, not only the spreadsheet, since the PDF is the record. GOV.UK has the rules.
This guide is about getting the numbers out of your statements. What counts as income and which expenses are allowable is for HMRC's guidance or your accountant.