When merging CSV files saves time
Many bank portals only export one month, or 90 days, at a time. Card issuers split business cards by employee. Payment processors produce one file per payout. Before you can reconcile a year, review a client's spending or build a single import, you need all of those rows in one place, with the columns lined up.
Copying and pasting between spreadsheets works for two files with identical layouts. It breaks down when one export has Posting Date first and another has Description first, when a bank adds a Balance column halfway through the year, or when you have thirty files. This tool does the matching for you.
How columns are matched
The first file sets the column order. For every other file, each header is compared to the columns already known after normalizing it: lowercase, punctuation removed, spaces collapsed. So Amount, AMOUNT and amount are the same column, and Check # stays distinct from Check. A header that doesn't match anything becomes a new column at the end.
Values are copied as text, exactly as they appear in each file. Dates aren't reformatted and amounts aren't recalculated, so the merged file is a faithful combination of the originals.
Step by step: combine a year of bank exports
- Download each monthly CSV from your bank. Keep the original files; don't open and save them in Excel first.
- Drop all of them on the tool at once. Use the arrows to put them in date order, oldest first.
- Keep Add a "Source file" column on. When a number looks wrong later, you'll know which statement it came from.
- Leave duplicate removal off unless your exports overlap (for example, if you downloaded "last 90 days" several times).
- Merge, check the row count against the sum of the files, and download.
Merging files from different banks
If the banks use different names for the same thing, such as Withdrawals in one and Debit in the other, they'll end up in separate columns. That's deliberate: guessing that two differently named columns mean the same thing is how numbers end up in the wrong place. Rename the header in one of the originals before merging, or convert each file to a common layout first with one of the converters.
After merging
- Importing into QuickBooks Online? Remove the Source file column during column mapping (or merge without it) and split the result if it's over 350 KB.
- Reconciling? Sort by date in your spreadsheet, then compare totals per month with the bank statements.
- Looking for double-counted transactions? The duplicate remover compares date, amount and similar descriptions, which catches repeats that aren't character-for-character identical.