CIBC (Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce) provides statements for personal and business chequing, savings and credit card accounts in Canadian dollars. The reviewed documents include a business chequing account statement from Quebec and an Aventura Visa Infinite credit card statement from Ontario, two layouts with different date, sign and column rules.
Full name: Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce
Countries: Canada
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 two CIBC documents from 2026: a twenty-page CIBC Account Statement for a business chequing account in Quebec and a four-page CIBC Aventura Visa Infinite Card statement from Ontario. They are two layouts from one bank. The chequing statement is one long table with Date, Description, Withdrawals ($), Deposits ($) and Balance ($). The card statement has two dates per row, a Spend Categories column, and a different left margin on odd and even pages.
Mon D with no year, Jan 2 and Jan 15, on the chequing statement, and only on the first transaction of each day. The period is in the header, "For Jan 1 to Jan 31, 2026". The card statement has two dates per row, transaction and posting, as Mon DD, Feb 27 and Mar 02, with the year only in "Statement Date March 27, 2026" and in the period line "February 28 to March 27, 2026".-4,912.46, and the balance forward line at the top of a page carries a dollar sign, -$1,136.46. The card statement prints purchases unsigned, credits with a leading minus, -681.26, and payments unsigned in their own section.4500 XXXX XXXX 7184, and repeats it before each cardholder section.BUS; the card statement names the product in the title, "CIBC Aventura Visa Infinite Card". Canadian dollars on both.On the chequing statement only the first transaction of a day carries a date. The rest of that day's rows have an empty date cell. In the reviewed statement Jan 2 covers about sixty e-transfer deposits that run over five pages, and the only dates on those pages are the Jan 2 Balance forward line at the top of each one. A converter that requires a date on every row keeps one transaction per day; one that reads the balance forward line as a transaction adds a deposit of the whole running balance at every page break. The date has to be carried down until the next dated row, and the Opening balance and Balance forward rows have to be skipped even though they sit in the table with a date and an amount.
An e-transfer deposit reads BUS ETRANSFER DEPOSIT on the dated line, TXN REF:C1Bv7A2fnK3R on the second, and the sender's name on the third. A bill payment reads BILL PAYMENT, then a line of fifteen zeros, then BELL CANADA TORVM5 EFT 5217. A card settlement reads DEBIT MEMO, SETTLEMENT 0264, CIBC DATA CENTRE 01020. A transfer reads CMO TRANSFER000000318604 with the transfer number glued to the words and FROM: 00412/34-01705 below it. An interest credit reads CREDIT MEMO and then INT @ 2.2500%. The first line is the transaction type, and the name a bookkeeper wants is on the second or third line. A converter that keeps the first line gives every e-transfer the payee BUS ETRANSFER DEPOSIT and every card settlement DEBIT MEMO; one that joins the lines gets a usable name with a reference in it.
No row has a sign. 1,595.00 under Withdrawals ($) and 1,595.00 under Deposits ($) look the same; only the right edge of the number decides which one it is, and the two columns are about 400 pixels apart at 300 dpi. An EFT RETURN row, a returned e-transfer, sits under Withdrawals with the reference 42 108 on the line below. A converter that takes the first number on the line as the amount and the second as the balance reads a deposit row correctly and a withdrawal row correctly, but it cannot tell them apart, so half the transactions get the wrong sign. The running balance is the check: it goes up on a deposit and down on a withdrawal.
The reviewed chequing account belongs to a Quebec business. The form is English, but the bank's own fee line reads FRAIS POUR DÉC (fees for December) and the sender names on e-transfers carry accents, Aurélie, Grégoire, Hélène. A converter that reads the PDF text as plain ASCII turns the accented letters into question marks or drops them, and the accounting software then fails to match the payee to the customer record that was typed in correctly.
The Visa statement is laid out for duplex printing. On page two the transaction date starts at about 150 pixels from the left edge and the amount ends at about 2250; on page three the same columns start at about 300 and end at about 2400. Every column shifts by the same 150 pixels. A converter that learns the column positions from the first page of transactions and applies them to the next page finds the amounts outside the amount column and the dates inside the margin. Page one has no transactions at all, only the summary, the payment stub and a note "Transactions begin on page 2", and the lower half of page two is the cardholder agreement in three narrow columns of small text.
Each purchase row reads Feb 27 Mar 02 TIM HORTONS #1742 905-471-0086 ON Restaurants 5.07: transaction date, posting date, merchant, a city or a phone number with the province, a spend category such as Restaurants, Transportation or Personal and Household Expenses, and the amount. The transaction date can be before the statement period starts, Feb 27 in a statement that runs from February 28. Some rows have a Q printed on a line of their own just above the row, the Aventura points multiplier marker, and on those rows the posting date is extracted after the amount. The statement has two cards, each introduced by a Card number 4500 XXXX XXXX 7184 line and closed by a Total for 4500 XXXX XXXX 7184 $3,412.89 line. A converter that treats the phone number as part of the merchant name, the category as part of the description, or the Q line as a row, produces payees like TIM HORTONS #1742 905-471-0086 ON Restaurants.
Page one has "Your account at a glance" with previous balance, payments, other credits, purchases and total balance in a column of amounts, the minimum payment and due date, the credit limit and available credit, and the Aventura points summary with five and six digit point totals. Page four has the "CIBC CreditSmart Spend Report", a table of spend categories with transaction counts, this month's amounts, budget and difference columns filled with dashes, and year to date amounts, followed by a Total Monthly Budget line. A converter that reads any line with an amount as a transaction picks up the points totals as dollar amounts and the spend report as a second copy of the month.
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.