Using bank statements to prepare your tax return

The job

Whether you file for yourself or hand records to an accountant, the raw material is the same: twelve months of statements, sometimes from several accounts and currencies. The task is to find income, identify deductible or reportable expenses where your tax rules allow, and have a record you can point to if you are asked about a line. Rules differ by country and by person, so this page is about organising the data, not about what you may claim.

A workflow

1. Load the whole year. Add all statements for the period. PDFs, scans, CSV and bank files can be mixed; see the converter.
2. Check the statuses. A Verified statement's rows agree with its printed balances. Resolve flagged rows against the original before you rely on totals; how verification works explains the checks.
3. Remove double counting. Overlapping statements and transfers between your own accounts are detected and excluded from totals by default, so moving money between accounts does not appear as income or spending.
4. Filter and categorise. Search by merchant words, date ranges and amount limits. Rows get a category that you can edit, and rows you do not want in totals can be left out.
5. Work in one currency. If you have accounts in several currencies, choose a reporting currency to see combined figures. These are public reference rates; for the filing, use the rate your tax authority or accountant specifies. See multi-currency statements.
6. Export. Send the Excel workbook to your accountant. It has a Transactions sheet with every row, a Statements sheet listing each source and its status, and a Summary sheet.

Questions the assistant can answer

The built-in assistant computes answers from your table locally: "total income in March", "how much did I spend with a given merchant", "compare this quarter with last quarter", "list payments over 500". Because the numbers are calculated from your rows and not by an AI, they match the table. If the assistant cannot understand a question, the wording of that question, not your transactions, may be sent to an AI service to be turned into a query. The Advanced AI features, off by default, sends a masked table to Google Gemini; keep it off if the statements are confidential. See the privacy policy.

What a statement cannot tell you

A bank statement shows money moving, not why. A deposit may be income, a refund, a loan or a gift; a payment may or may not be deductible. Categories in Tallyscope are a convenience, not a tax classification. Keep receipts and invoices; a statement line alone is rarely enough support. If a statement is marked Unverified because it has no running balance, as some card exports do, treat its totals with extra care.

Plans

CSV export is free for the first 25 rows. For a full year you will want unlimited CSV or Excel, which the Day pass (EUR 9, 24 hours) includes for a one-off job. The Pro plan suits people who do this regularly. See pricing.

This page is general information, not tax advice; ask a qualified adviser about your own situation. Open Tallyscope to start.