American Express issues charge and credit cards and provides monthly statements in US dollars and, for UK card members, in pounds. The reviewed statements include business accounts with several card members, a personal card, a UK Statement of Account, scanned copies and a year-end summary.
Countries: United States, United Kingdom
Supported statement formats: PDF
Supported destinations: QuickBooks Desktop, QuickBooks Online, Quicken, Xero, CSV/Excel
QuickBooks Online can read a PDF statement itself: Banking, Upload transactions, choose the PDF. Try it first. Use ProperConvert when QuickBooks flags the statement for review, stops before the last page, or the account is not in QuickBooks Online.
For a short statement, type the date, memo, and amount into the destination. Reconcile the result to the closing balance.
Open the PDF statement, review the extracted transactions, choose QuickBooks Online, and save the converted file on your computer.
Choose the posted transaction date, supply a missing year from the statement period, and check statements that cross January.
Remove currency symbols from numeric cells, preserve the decimal separator, and verify debit and credit signs against the running balance.
Keep the payee or customer reference that helps identify the transaction, while avoiding repeated headers and unrelated reference numbers.
The following details were checked against American Express statements from 2020 to 2026: US Business Platinum and business card statements with several card members, a US personal card, a UK Statement of Account in pounds, two scanned copies and a year-end summary. American Express issues charge and credit cards only, so every statement is a card statement: charges are money out and payments are money in, and the signs must be flipped for accounting software that keeps a credit card account.
MM/DD/YY. A date with an asterisk, 11/21/25*, is a posting date, used for payments and credits; charges carry the transaction date. The Closing Date sits in the page header, and the billing period runs about a month back from it, so most statements cross a month and the December one crosses the year. UK statements print the date as separate elements, Sep and 2, in two columns (transaction date, then process date), with the closing date as 15/09/20.-$6,950.31; charges have no sign, $609.20. Some amounts carry a Pay Over Time marker glued to them, $50.00 ⧫. UK statements print pounds without a symbol in the column and mark it in the header, Amount £.Account Ending 0-84008; the full 15-digit number appears only in the payment coupon scan line at the bottom of page one. Use the ending as the account ID, or supply the full number by hand.The Account Summary on page one shows Previous Balance, Payments/Credits, New Charges, Fees, Interest Charged and New Balance. On Pay Over Time accounts it shows them three times: a Pay In Full portion, a Pay Over Time portion and an Account Total. The Payments and Credits and New Charges sections then repeat the totals again in their own Summary tables, split into Pay In Full, Pay Over Time and Total columns. None of these are transactions, and a converter that reads summary rows collects the same payment six times.
Below the summary, the payment coupon repeats the New Balance and Minimum Payment Due, and a long digit string encodes the account number and the balance.
Payments and Credits comes first, then New Charges, then Fees and Interest Charged. Inside each section a Summary table precedes the Detail list. Business accounts split the Detail by card member with a Card Ending 5-46006 heading, and the Summary lists one line per card member with their total. The card member's name appears in the summary line, not on each transaction, so assigning rows to people means tracking the current Card Ending heading.
The first line holds the date, the merchant, the city, the state and the amount. The lines below it hold the merchant phone number or reference, and on some rows several lines of purchase detail: RX TRUCK WIPER 22 1 EA TKSV, or IT1 SPR INT FL ;UPI 3087.0000;QTY from a paint supplier. The number of continuation lines varies, and the item detail contains numbers that look like amounts. A converter must attach every line without a date to the row above and must not read numbers inside those lines as transactions.
Within one transaction, the merchant and the date can sit about seven pixels apart vertically, and the amount can sit a further line down. Grouping elements into rows with a tight vertical tolerance splits one transaction into two rows, one with a merchant and one with a date and amount. The tolerance needs to be about a third of the line height, or the row must be built from the date element outward.
Payments read ONLINE PAYMENT - THANK YOU or MOBILE PAYMENT - THANK YOU, credits read DISPUTE CREDIT - MICROSOFT or a merchant name, and all are negative. On statements with several card members the payment row also names the card member who paid. These rows carry the posting date with an asterisk, while charges carry the transaction date, so a file that uses one date field mixes two meanings.
Foreign purchases show a Foreign Spend column with the original currency amount and rate, and the billed amount in the Amount column. Only the billed amount is a transaction; the foreign amount belongs in the memo.
The UK Statement of Account uses two date columns split into month and day elements, Amount £, a Card Number xxxx-xxxxxx-62005 line per card member, Transactions for headings and a Total new spend transactions for line per card member. Dates are day first. Everything else about grouping and signs applies.
The Year-End Summary groups a year's charges by category, per card member, with monthly totals. It has no payments, no running balance, and no closing balance to reconcile against. It can be converted for a spending report but not as a transaction history.
Scans of American Express statements lose the small Pay Over Time markers and the asterisks on posting dates, and OCR splits -$6,950.31 into a sign, a symbol and a number. The New Balance formula on page one, previous balance minus payments plus charges plus fees plus interest, is the check that catches missing or doubled rows.
Compare the converted transaction count and totals with the statement, then confirm that the calculated final balance equals the printed closing balance.
Yes. If the PDF statement is readable, its age does not prevent conversion. Confirm the year when transaction rows omit it.
No. Convert posted transactions that contribute to the statement balance. Pending or future-dated items should not be mixed into that reconciliation.
Use the destination-specific settings below, then review the file before import. The destination may require particular columns, dates, account identifiers, or sign rules.
A bank PDF can contain searchable text, scanned page images, or a mixture of both. Searchable text still needs layout analysis because transaction descriptions wrap, columns move, and headers or balances repeat at page breaks. A scanned statement adds OCR uncertainty.
A transaction may begin at the bottom of one page and continue on the next. Continuation pages can omit column headings, repeat an opening balance, or insert footer text and legal pages between transaction pages. A conversion should join split rows and exclude repeated page furniture before it writes the output.
On scanned pages, OCR can turn 0 into O, 1 into l, or 5 into S. It can also lose a minus sign or decimal mark, read two columns in the wrong order, or struggle with skewed and faint pages. The running balance is the best check: a damaged amount or missing row breaks the balance sequence.
Yes. Review the OCR result and reconcile every balance movement. Scans with faint printing, rotation, or handwritten marks need more checking than searchable PDFs.
PDF text stores page positions rather than a spreadsheet table. Wrapped descriptions, repeated headers, and visually aligned columns can paste in the wrong order or into the wrong cells.
Try selecting a transaction description in a PDF reader. If individual words can be selected, the page probably contains text. If the whole page behaves like one picture, it requires OCR.
QuickBooks Online imports bank transactions from a file through Banking, Upload transactions. It accepts QBO, QFX and OFX files, which share the OFX structure, and CSV files. Uploaded rows land in the For Review list, where QuickBooks matches them to existing entries and the user adds or excludes them.
Since 2026 the same upload screen also takes a PDF or an image of a statement (JPG, PNG, HEIC). Intuit's AI reads the pages, and a statement it cannot read with confidence is held for a manual review by Intuit staff. If the account is in QuickBooks Online and the statement is a clean PDF, try that first; it costs nothing. A converted file is the better route when the upload flags the statement or stops before the last page, when there are many statements to catch up, when the bookkeeper wants to see and fix every row before it enters the books, or when a client's statement should not be uploaded to a third party.
Settings that matter:
MM/DD/YYYY or DD/MM/YYYY depending on the company settings, digits only, four-digit years.Use OFX, QFX or QBO when the file can be made in that format. It carries the payee, the memo and the check number and gives QuickBooks a transaction ID for duplicate checks. Use CSV when a spreadsheet is the only source and a single description is enough.
The usual causes are a date column QuickBooks cannot read, an amount with a currency symbol or thousands separator, more columns than the three- or four-column layout, or a file over the size limit. Save the file with dates as digits, amounts as plain numbers, and only the needed columns.
The account was chosen during upload. QuickBooks Online does not read the account name from the file. Exclude the rows, delete them from Excluded, and upload again with the right account selected.
In For Review, select the rows, choose Batch actions, Exclude Selected. Open Excluded, select them again, Batch actions, Delete. The rows are gone and the file can be uploaded again.
QuickBooks Online skips rows whose transaction ID it has already seen and, for CSV, rows it reads as duplicates by date, amount and description. Two genuine identical rows on the same day can be dropped from a CSV. Use an OFX-type file with unique IDs for those.
Yes. The 90-day limit applies to a live bank connection, not to a file upload. Any date range can be uploaded from a file.
For one clean statement of an account that is already in QuickBooks Online, the built-in upload is the shortest path, and this page says so. A converter earns its place when the upload flags the statement for review, when a scanned or multi-year statement does not go through, when the account is in QuickBooks Desktop, Quicken, Xero or Sage instead, or when the statement must stay on your computer. The converted file goes through the same Upload transactions screen as a QBO file, with a transaction ID per row, so re-uploading a period does not double it.