What
Banks send statements as fixed-width records, SWIFT messages, ISO 20022 XML, CSV, or PDF. BAI2 is common at US banks. MT940 is a SWIFT customer statement used worldwide. camt.053 is the ISO 20022 XML successor many European banks now send. A PDF is only useful here when it has a real text layer.
Why
Spreadsheets want rows. Those native formats do not. Opening a .bai, .sta or .xml in Excel shows broken columns, not transactions. Control totals and structured references stay trapped in trailers and tags until a parser writes one transaction per row.
How
The converters on F20 FinanceOps parse the file, write one transaction per row, and check that opening balance plus net movement matches the closing balance the file itself declared. Scanned or photographed statements are refused; there is no OCR.
After conversion, check data quality, then reconcile to a cash book. Convert first. Match second. Do not reconcile a file whose own trailers already disagree.