How to import bank statements into TallyPrime

TallyPrime has a proper bank statement import — Alt+O (Import) → Bank Statement — with a preview screen, duplicate matching and a reconciliation summary at the end. What it doesn't have is a way to read the file your bank actually sent you: a password-protected PDF with Dr/Cr columns, lakh-grouped figures and narrations that wrap across lines. So the job is two steps: turn the PDF into clean data, then run Tally's own import. Both steps have traps; here's the route that avoids them.

What TallyPrime's import accepts

Two routes, depending on your release:

• Alt+O → Bank Statement — the native route. TallyPrime reads the statement formats of 145+ banks, posts against a bank ledger you choose, and shows a preview before anything lands. This is the smoothest path when your file is in a format Tally recognises.
• Alt+O → Transactions (Release 4.0 onwards) — a general Excel import with a column mapping step, for when you want explicit control over what maps where.

Either way, the input is structured data — Excel or delimited files. A PDF, locked or not, is a picture of a table. That's the gap conversion closes.

Step 1: Convert the PDF

Upload the statement to NoRekey and download the result as Excel. Every conversion is checked against the statement's own opening and closing balances before you download, so you're not importing numbers you'll have to re-verify later. Along the way, the Indian-statement quirks are normalised:

• Dr/Cr columns become one signed amount — money out negative, money in positive — with every sign verified against the running balance, so nothing arrives flipped.
• Lakh grouping (1,23,456.78) becomes standard decimals instead of importing as garbage thousands.
• DD-MM-YYYY dates become ISO, so no month/day ambiguity survives.
• Password-protected e-statements open at upload — enter the password from the covering email; it's used to open the file and never stored.
• Wrapped UPI narrations are stitched back onto single rows, so a two-line reference never imports as two entries.

Scanned branch printouts work too — they convert through OCR with the same balance verification (here's how scanned statements are handled).

Step 2: Import into TallyPrime

1. From Gateway of Tally, press Alt+O (Import) → Bank Statement.
2. Select the bank ledger the statement belongs to.
3. Point the import at your file and set Show Preview to Yes — always preview; this is where a wrong-ledger mistake gets caught for free.
4. Press Ctrl+A to see the Bank Statement Preview, check a few rows against the statement, then press I to import.
5. The Summary of Imported Statement shows how many entries landed and how many matched existing ones. Press S for the Bank Reconciliation Summary.

On Release 4.0+, the Transactions route works the same way but adds a mapping screen: assign date, narration and amount columns once, and Tally remembers the template.

What about Tally XML?

Plenty of practices — especially those still on Tally ERP 9, which predates the bank statement import — run Excel-to-XML converters that turn spreadsheet rows into vouchers. NoRekey deliberately exports Excel and CSV rather than Tally XML: XML vouchers encode your ledgers and chart of accounts, which no converter can know without guessing, and guessed ledger allocations are exactly the kind of error that surfaces at audit. Clean columns in, your own tools or Tally's own import doing the posting — that's the honest division of labour.

Step 3: Prove it reconciled

After importing, check the bank ledger's closing balance for the period against the statement's printed closing balance. If you converted with NoRekey, the rows already passed that exact arithmetic — the conversion refuses to export silently when the transactions don't tie out to the statement's own totals — so this is a ten-second confirmation. If the ledger disagrees, the difference is on the Tally side: usually entries that already existed on the ledger before the import, not the file.

Bank-specific walkthroughs

The conversion step differs slightly by bank — password formats, statement layouts, UPI density. There are dedicated guides for SBI, HDFC, ICICI, Axis, Kotak and PNB, plus a Tally converter page covering the full workflow.