Converting scanned or photographed bank statements (OCR) without uploading them

How OCR works on bank statements, how to get accurate results from scans and phone photos, and how Rowledger verifies the result against the printed balances, entirely in your browser.

A scanned statement is just an image inside a PDF: there is no text to extract. OCR (optical character recognition) reads the pixels back into characters. Rowledger runs OCR locally in your browser, so the scan never leaves your computer.

Getting the best input

• Scan at 200–300 dpi in black and white or greyscale. Statements scanned at 100 dpi or as heavily compressed JPEGs lose the thin strokes in 1, 7 and the decimal point.
• Photos: fill the frame, keep the page flat, avoid shadows across the amount columns, and shoot straight on. Rowledger upscales small photos, but it can't invent missing pixels.
• One statement per file. Multi-statement bundles work, but the opening/closing check is per statement.
• Crop out nothing. The statement period, opening and closing balance lines are what make verification possible.

What Rowledger does with the OCR output

1. Recognises words with their positions on the page.
2. Rebuilds lines and columns from those positions, using the same engine as text PDFs.
3. Fixes common OCR confusions inside numbers (O→0, l→1, S→5).
4. Works out which column is the running balance and checks every row against it. A digit misread as another digit shows up as a ⚠ balance mismatch on that row, which you can correct in place.

In our tests a 220 dpi rasterised statement converts with every row reconciling; phone photos typically need one or two corrections per page.

Free vs Pro

The free plan OCRs the first two pages of each scanned statement; Pro removes the limit and adds batch processing. Everything still runs on your device.

Privacy note

Most online OCR converters upload the scan to their servers and many retain it. Because Rowledger ships the OCR engine to your browser instead, you can verify the claim yourself: load the page, turn off your Wi-Fi, and convert. It still works.