Home › Comparisons › OCR vs digital PDF conversion
Two kinds of statement PDF look identical in a viewer and behave completely differently in conversion. Knowing which one you hold explains every accuracy difference.
A digital PDF — the kind downloaded from online banking — contains the actual text of the statement in layout order. A converter reads those characters directly: the digits are the digits, and extraction errors are rare and mostly structural (wrapped descriptions, repeated page headers).
A scanned PDF contains only a picture of the page. Before anything can be extracted, OCR (optical character recognition) has to guess the characters from the image — and guesses about digits are where errors live. That is not a reason to refuse scans; it is a reason the verification step matters twice as much for them.
Best for: Statements downloaded from online banking — the normal case.
Watch out: Print-to-PDF from a browser viewer can degrade layout; download the bank's own PDF where offered.
Best for: Paper statements, scans and photos — the only copy that exists.
Watch out: Flat, straight, high-resolution scans (around 300 dpi) materially improve accuracy; skewed phone photos are the hardest input.
The verdict is procedural: prefer the digital original whenever it exists — if the client still has online banking access, downloading beats scanning every time. When the scan is all there is, OCR plus a hard reconciliation gate is an honest pipeline: what ties can be trusted, what flags gets eyeballed against the image.
What neither route excuses is skipping the check. An unverified conversion — from any source — is a draft, not data.
Try selecting a single transaction amount with the mouse in a PDF viewer. If text highlights, it is digital; if the whole page drags as one image, it is a scan.
It can, but quality rules apply: flat page, even light, full frame, no shadows across the table. A proper scan at a steady resolution is always the better input.
Where the statement prints opening and closing (or running) balances, the converter adds up the extracted transactions and compares the result with the statement itself. If the numbers do not tie, the conversion is flagged and the mismatched rows are marked — a failed check is never shown as a success.
No. Uploaded files and generated exports are stored only briefly to complete the download and are automatically deleted within 15 minutes.
Your first conversion is free — no card, no sign-up — and every result is reconciled against the statement itself before you download it.