Reading a statement without fooling yourself

A statement is a list of money moving in and out of one account over a period, plus a summary. Most spending mistakes come from reading the direction or the date of a row wrongly, not from the arithmetic.

Direction: which way did the money move?

Bank accounts and credit cards look at the same purchase from opposite sides.

On a bank account, money out (a purchase, a bill, a transfer away) usually shows as negative or in a Debit or Withdrawals column. Money in shows as positive or under Credit or Deposits.
On a credit card, a purchase increases what you owe, so card exports often show it as a positive number. Payments and refunds reduce the balance and often appear as negative, or with a CR marker.

The CFPB's fictional sample credit card statement shows this: its summary lists "Payment, Credits -$350.42" and "Purchases $1,258.56". StatementLens asks which convention your file uses and stores every amount the same way afterwards: money in is positive, money out is negative. A CR marker always means money in, and DR always means money out.

Dates

Order. 03/04/2026 is 4 March in the US order (month first) and 3 April in day-first order. Check one row whose day is above 12; it settles the question.
Missing year. Many PDFs print only month and day. Enter the year of the statement's closing date in StatementLens. Every row that got its year this way is marked in the review. If the rows run from December into January, July to December rows get the previous year and January to June rows the year you entered, and a warning says so; check it against the statement period.
Transaction date vs posting date. Some statements show both. Pick one and use it for every file, or a purchase near the end of a month may land in different months.

Running balance and the summary box

When a statement prints a balance after each row, each balance should equal the previous balance plus that row's amount. When you map the balance column, StatementLens checks every pair and marks the rows where the numbers do not agree. Enter the printed opening and closing balances too: if the rows you approved do not add up to the difference, something is missing, doubled or signed the wrong way.

A mismatch does not tell you which side is wrong. Statements themselves occasionally disagree with their own lines. Find the first row where the check fails and compare it with the PDF or your bank's website.

Things that are not spending

Transfers between your own accounts and card payments move money you already counted. See transfers and duplicates.
Refunds are money in, but they are not income. StatementLens puts refund-like rows into a Refunds category; you can move a refund into the category of the original purchase so the category total is net of it.
Pending transactions may appear in an activity export and later post with a different amount. Prefer posted transactions for monthly totals.

What the totals mean

StatementLens adds the rows you left ticked. Money out is the sum of the negative rows, money in the sum of the positive rows, and net is the difference. Categories come from simple keyword rules and are often wrong for small merchants, so look at Uncategorized first. None of this is advice about budgets, tax or credit; it is a sorted view of your own rows.