Dates are where statement conversions quietly go wrong: 03/04 is March in New York and April in London, and plenty of banks don't print a year on transaction lines at all. Exports side-step the whole class of problem.
The rules
- Exports always use ISO dates — YYYY-MM-DD — which read the same way in every locale and import unambiguously into QuickBooks, Xero, Sage and spreadsheets.
- The statement's own convention is respected on the way in. A UK statement's 05/03 is read as 5 March; a US statement's 03/05 is read the same day. The layout and locale of the document decide, not a global setting.
- Missing years are resolved from the statement period. Citi and several Canadian banks print transaction dates without a year; the year comes from the statement's covering period — including the December-into-January statement, where rows land correctly on both sides of the year boundary.
Why you can trust it
Date resolution isn't guesswork that goes unchecked: the transactions must reconcile against the statement's printed opening and closing balances in order, so a date placed in the wrong month or year breaks the chain and surfaces as a flagged conversion rather than a quiet error.
In your books
Import screens that ask for a date format can take ISO directly (QuickBooks accepts it as-is). If your tool insists on a regional format, map it on the import screen — the values convert without ambiguity.