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Turn a bank statement PDF into Excel rows from chat

The most common bookkeeping ask is also the most fiddly: your bank only exports PDF statements, your accountant wants a spreadsheet, and copy-paste from a PDF produces one mangled line per transaction. The bank-statement MCP server does the extraction and the tidying in chat.

From PDF to rows in two steps

Point the server at the PDF - a local file path in Claude Desktop or Claude Code - and ask it to extract the transactions. It reads the statement layout, pulls out date, description, amount and balance, and returns one row per transaction with the running balance cross-checked so you can see immediately whether a line was misread. Then ask for CSV: the output pastes straight into Excel with correct columns, dates as dates, negatives as negatives.

Follow-ups are where it beats a converter website: "categorise these into rent, software, travel and client payments" runs each row through the categoriser and returns the same rows with a category column - the exact workflow in the bank statement categorisation guide. Nothing is uploaded anywhere; parsing happens locally.

One click, with no JSON. Download bank-statement.mcpb from the latest release and open it in Claude Desktop. It runs on the Node runtime Claude Desktop ships with, so your own PATH and node version never come into it.

Or a URL, with nothing installed. /mcp/connect mints a free anonymous token and prints the ready line:

claude mcp add --transport http bank-statement https://mcp.zovo.one/mcp/bank-statement/t/<token>

Or from a clone, for a client with no bundle installer. Build once, then point the client at the built file:

git clone https://github.com/theluckystrike/mcp-servers.git
cd mcp-servers && npm install
npm run build -w packages/mcp-license -w servers/bank-statement

claude mcp add --scope user bank-statement -- node /absolute/path/to/mcp-servers/servers/bank-statement/dist/index.js

Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf and Cline take the same two strings as JSON, in claude_desktop_config.json or the client's own MCP config file:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "bank-statement": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/mcp-servers/servers/bank-statement/dist/index.js"]
    }
  }
}

The npm packages are not published yet, so the npx form below returns a 404 today. It is kept because it is what that config becomes the day the publish lands, with nothing else changed; installing these servers when npx does not work yet has the whole picture.

claude mcp add bank-statement -- npx -y @theluckystrike/mcp-bank-statement

Getting it into Excel without mangling dates

Paste the CSV rows into a sheet, select the date column, and set its format to your locale's date format - that is the one manual step. If you then want the numbers checked, the reconciliation guide covers matching the statement rows against invoices you issued, and the categorisation guide covers building a category scheme your accountant will accept.

Free tier handles occasional statements. Pro is a one-time payment per server or part of the bundle, and removes the monthly processing cap.

Questions

Does it work with scanned statements?

It reads text-layer PDFs, which is what almost every bank generates. A photographed or scanned image without a text layer needs OCR first.

Is my statement uploaded to a server?

No. The server runs locally and reads the file from disk. Nothing leaves your machine.

Can it categorise the transactions too?

Yes - the same server categorises extracted rows into schemes like rent, software, travel and income, and you can refine the mapping in chat.

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Servers used in this guide: MCP Bank Statement · MCP Spreadsheet