Use case
Give an accountant a table without forwarding the whole PDF
Accountants often ask for “the statement”. What they can work with is usually a list of dates, payees and amounts they can filter. Forwarding the bank PDF also forwards letterhead, account numbers in the header, and every page of noise. Uploading that PDF to a free converter adds a third party. Ledger is for the case you want a sheet you produced yourself, on your machine, from the digital file the bank already issued.
Drop the PDF, remap Date / Description / Debit / Credit / Balance, export Excel. The Notes sheet records the original filename so you can match it to the PDF you keep in the same folder. Send the .xlsx if that is what they asked for. Keep the PDF as the official document — Ledger is not a substitute for it and not a signature on a return.
If the accountant needs an untouched PDF, send that instead and skip this tool. If they need a working table and you do not want the file sitting on a converter host, this is the job. Check totals before you attach the sheet to an email. Do not paste the live statement into a chat with us; we do not want it.
Typical flow: download January from the bank as PDF, convert on this page, rename the xlsx to the client and the month, store the PDF next to it. If two accounts exist (current and savings), convert them separately so columns do not merge. Ignore fee-summary boxes at the end if they are not transactions — set those columns to Ignore. If a foreign-currency line printed two amounts, keep the one in the account currency and tell the accountant which it is. Ledger will not pick a FX rate for you.
Self-employed people sometimes need a year of tables. Do not drop a 200-page annual scan. Export each quarter from online banking as a digital PDF, run Ledger four times, and concatenate in Excel. That is slower than a magic “all banks API”, and it does not require sharing credentials with us, because we never asked for credentials.
When the sheet goes out, say in the email that it was produced locally from the bank PDF dated X, and attach the PDF if they still want the original. Two files: official document plus working table. That pairing is what “not a filing” means in practice.