Importing PDF bank statement information into financial programs

[elsie]

Last year I wrote about problems I was having importing Boursorama/BoursoBank into MSMoney. The problems still remains for the current bank account and Visa credit card information mixed together in a single CSV file and without proper reconciliation.

The following should also be applicable to information from other banks and financial institutions in different formats and for creating output for other personal financial accounting/budgeting packages, spreadsheets, etc.

Boursorama provide separate PDF multipage statements for current and Visa accounts. I've experimented with various techniques and programs to extract the data for import into MSMoney in CSV and QIF format. There are some fee-charging services which claim to do the conversions but I have not tried any.

I've concluded using an AI application is the quickest way to get accurate results and claude.ai (currently Claude Sonnet 4.5 within Perplexity.ai) is the best. All that is needed is a request such as "can you convert the attached PDF to a QIF for import into UK MSMoney" and attaching the PDF. It is not necessary to process the PDF files one by one; the AI will either consolidate the output as one file or as separate files (and if asked in the query) . You can even mix statements for different accounts; the AI program will recognise them as different accounts and create separate output files.

It is possible to export the Boursorama LIvret A and other saving accounts as CSV files without any problems and then convert them to QIF but taking the PDF statement conversion route directly to QIF is just as easy.