Getting startedUpdated 16 July 2026

Converting old paper statements

Estate administration, audits, probate, catch-up bookkeeping for a closed account — sooner or later the source material is a stack of paper from before online banking existed.

The workflow

  1. Scan or photograph each statement — flat, well-lit, all corners in frame. A phone photo works; a flatbed scan works better.
  2. Upload the images or scanned PDFs. They convert through OCR at 3 pages of allowance per page (you'll see the cost before anything converts).
  3. Trust the balance check, not the OCR. Every conversion — however old the layout — is reconciled against the statement's own printed opening and closing balances. A misread digit on rough paper surfaces as a flagged mismatch, never as silently wrong data.

Old layouts are fine

NoRekey reads each statement's own layout rather than matching templates, so a 1998 statement from a bank that no longer exists converts on the same terms as a fresh PDF. Merged and renamed banks (Truist's BB&T/SunTrust history, Virgin Money's Clydesdale era, FAB's NBAD legacy) are everyday material.

Practical tips

  • Convert in date order and import oldest-first, so running history builds cleanly.
  • One statement at a time isn't necessary — batch upload converts a whole shoebox in parallel, each statement independently verified.
  • If a page is too rough to read reliably, the honest answer is a flagged conversion — re-scan that page rather than accepting a guess.
Was this guide helpful?
Got a statement to convert?
Free to try — no sign-up, balance-checked, deleted within the hour.
Convert a statement