Amex statement to Excel
An American Express statement is a credit card statement, so converting it is less about income and more about spending: a year of charges as rows, sorted by merchant and category, with every monthly charge listed. This guide covers downloading the PDF, what charges and payments turn into, how to check the totals, and the one thing an Amex statement is not good for.
Downloading the PDF from American Express
Log in at americanexpress.com, open the card account, and go to the statements area (American Express groups it under a heading along the lines of "Statements & Activity"). Choose the billing period and download the statement as PDF. Each file covers one billing cycle, which closes on the same date each month rather than at month end, so the file for "October" may run from mid-September to mid-October. American Express keeps several years of statements online. The app offers the same downloads, but a computer is quicker for a year's worth, and that is where you will use the tool.
If you hold more than one card, or a business and a personal card, each has its own statements. Download them separately so the export's Statement column tells them apart.
Why the PDF statement, not an export or a scan
The tool reads the text inside the PDF, which the statement American Express generates contains. A scan or a photo of a paper statement is an image with no text layer, and scanned statements are not supported yet. American Express also lets you export activity in spreadsheet formats; if you only want the rows, that is a fine option, but it is not a statement. The statement has the previous balance, the payments and credits total, the new charges total and the new balance printed on the first page, and those printed totals are what make the check below possible.
What charges and payments become
On a card statement the two money columns mean the reverse of a bank account. Charges are debits: each purchase, each fee, each interest line, with the merchant name and location as American Express prints it. Payments and credits are credits: your payments to the card, merchant refunds, statement credits and Membership Rewards redeemed against the balance. The description keeps the bank's wording, which on Amex statements is usually a clean merchant name, so the category rules (restaurants, travel, groceries, subscriptions, shopping, fuel) land well. Change a category on one row and every row with the same merchant follows.
Where card statements shine is the subscriptions list. Streaming services, software, cloud storage and memberships tend to live on a card rather than a checking account, and twelve statements give the tool twelve chances to see each one: same merchant, amount within 5%, roughly monthly, at least three times. The list shows the merchant, the day of the month it charges, the usual amount and how many of the months it appeared in.
The parser reads layouts from column headings and amount positions and has been checked against public sample PDFs from banks and synthetic statements, not against American Express statements specifically. If a statement comes out with rows missing or signs reversed, the rating buttons under the table send us the type of error, nothing more.
Checking the totals
The balance line under the rows was built for bank accounts, where opening balance plus credits minus debits equals the closing balance. A card balance grows with charges, so the line may report that the statement has no balances to check; that is expected. Check a card statement by hand instead: a SUM of the Debit column in the export should equal the new charges total printed on the first page (plus any fees and interest, which the statement lists separately), and a SUM of the Credit column should equal the payments and credits total. If both match, every row is there.
Export to Excel
Export Excel writes an .xlsx file; Export CSV writes a comma-separated file. Columns: Date, Description, Category, Debit, Credit, Balance, Statement, Page. For a card the Balance column is usually empty and can be deleted. A pivot table of Debit by Category and month is a spending report, and the Page column points back to the statement for any line you doubt.
Questions
Can I use Amex statements for a bank-statement loan? No. Lenders compute income from deposits into a bank account; payments to a card are not deposits, and the lender view would read them as such. Use checking statements for the lender view and the card statements for your own spending picture.
Several months at once? Yes, up to 24 statements in one drop, rows in date order across all of them, charts and the subscriptions list over the whole period.
My statement PDF is password-protected. Not supported. Open it in a PDF viewer, enter the password, save a copy without one, and drop the copy.
Where does the statement go? Nowhere. It is read on your computer by your browser, and the Excel file is built there too. The privacy page lists the one content-free usage event that is recorded.
Bank accounts: Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Capital One. The analyzer page explains the categories and charts.