Import a bank statement PDF without linking your bank account

September 19, 2026 · 5 min read · ReceiptIQ AI 2.3.8 (Beta feature)

Most expense and budgeting apps that want your bank transactions ask for the same thing first: connect your bank account, through them. In exchange the app gets a standing feed of everything that moves through your account, until you remember to revoke it.

ReceiptIQ AI 2.3.8, released on September 18, 2026, does the same job a different way: you give the app the statement PDF your bank already gives you, once, and it reads every row into a transaction. No login, no linking, no standing connection. It is marked Beta, and this post is specific about what it does well and where it still needs work.

What it actually does

Tap +, choose Bank Statement, then Choose a PDF. A photo or the camera work too, but a PDF is the reliable path: it is read directly from the file, row by row, with no text recognition in between. The app extracts the statement's text on your iPhone, sends that text for processing, and gets back a list of transactions: store, date, amount and a category for each.

Three things happen before you save anything:

• Refunds are paired with the purchase they cancel. A −$45.00 line a few days after a $45.00 line is shown as a matched pair, not as two unrelated entries.
• Possible duplicates are flagged, not silently skipped and not silently added. If a row looks like something you already saved from a receipt (same amount, within a few days), it is marked, and you decide.
• The rows are checked against the statement's own printed total. When they add up to the total your bank printed, the review list says so, which is a quick way to see that nothing was missed.

Ordinary transactions start ticked; refund pairs and possible duplicates start unticked. Card payments are left out, because paying your card bill is a transfer, not spending. Nothing is saved until you tap the button that saves it.

A real example

We tested this on a real four-page credit-card statement before shipping it. Details that would identify the bank or the cardholder are left out on purpose; the numbers are real:

• 21 purchase and refund rows on the statement, 21 transactions extracted. Nothing missed, nothing invented. The one card-payment row was left out, as intended.
• The extracted rows added up to the statement's printed total exactly, to the cent.
• About 4 seconds from choosing the PDF to seeing the list.
• Roughly 88% of the document never left the phone. Three of the four pages were legal terms and advertising; only the transaction rows, the statement period and the printed totals were sent.

One real statement is one data point, not a guarantee for every bank's PDF layout. That is part of why this ships as a Beta.

What it deliberately does not do

• No bank login, ever. You never type a bank password into this app, and the app never asks your bank for anything.
• No account linking and no account aggregation. There is no standing connection to revoke later, because there was never one: the PDF is a one-time file, not a feed.
• No email inbox connection. If your statements arrive by email, you save the PDF yourself and hand it to the app; the app does not read your inbox.

This is a product decision, not a feature we have not got to. Linking a bank needs an account and a permission grant on both sides; a file you choose needs neither.

The Beta caveats

• Scanned, image-only PDFs fall back to text recognition, which is less reliable than a PDF with real text in it. Expect to correct more by hand.
• Chequing and current accounts with separate withdrawal and deposit columns are less tested than the single-amount layout most credit-card statements use. Check the results more carefully.
• A refund you tick is currently saved as income, not as a negative expense. The arithmetic is right, but it may not be how you want your categories to read.
• We have not tested every bank's PDF layout and will not claim we have. If a statement reads badly, tell us; we would rather fix a real statement's problem than guess at one.

Privacy: what is actually sent

The statement's rows, the period it covers and its printed totals are extracted on your iPhone and sent as text for processing, the same way the text of a photographed receipt is. Card and account numbers are masked on the device before that text is sent. If the PDF is password-protected, the password is used once, on your phone, to open the file; it is never sent or saved. The file itself stays on your phone. The details are in the privacy policy.

Questions

Does ReceiptIQ AI need my online banking login to import a statement?

No. You download the statement PDF from your own bank, the same file you would hand to an accountant, and choose it in the app. ReceiptIQ AI never asks for your bank username or password and never connects to your bank account.

Is this the same as connecting my bank account through an account-aggregation service?

No. There is no ongoing connection to your bank at all: no login, no linking, no standing feed of transactions. You hand over one PDF file when you choose to, and nothing more happens until you import another one.

What happens to my card and account numbers when I import a statement?

They are masked on your iPhone before any text is sent for processing, so ReceiptIQ AI's servers never see the unmasked numbers. If the PDF is password-protected, the password is used once, on your phone, to open the file, and is never sent or stored.

Everything the app does, next to ReceiptIQ Lite (which never scans and has no statement import), is on the Features page.