Excel to Tally vs PDF to Tally: which do you need?

If you have Excel or CSV

Tally can take that more directly

TallyPrime can natively import bank statements in Excel, CSV and MT940 formats — that's the format its own Connected Banking reconciliation flow expects. You'll still need to map transactions to ledgers unless your bank is one of Connected Banking's supported partners, but there's no PDF-to-XML conversion step needed.

If you only have a PDF

That's the gap bank2tally fills

Plenty of statements only arrive as a PDF — emailed by the bank, or downloaded from net banking with no Excel option. Tally can't open that file directly. bank2tally reads the PDF and returns either Tally-ready XML (already-mapped, balanced vouchers) or a clean Excel spreadsheet, if you'd rather work from that instead.

Choosing bank2tally's own output

XML or Excel — same upload, different result

Choose XML if you want vouchers posted straight into Tally. Choose Excel if you want a spreadsheet for review, working papers, or a client deliverable — see the PDF to Excel converter for that path specifically.

Why the file format even matters

Excel and CSV carry structure; a PDF doesn't

An Excel or CSV export already separates each value into its own cell — Tally (or any software) can read "this is the debit column, this is the date column" directly from the file's structure. A PDF has no such structure to read: what looks like a table is really just text positioned on a page for a human eye to line up visually. That's the entire reason a conversion step exists for PDFs and not for Excel/CSV — software has to reconstruct the columns a PDF only implies, which is exactly what bank2tally's column-position parsing does per bank.

If you're not sure which you have

Check the file extension, not the icon

A file ending in .xlsx or .csv is spreadsheet data, regardless of what icon your browser shows it with. A file ending in .pdf is a PDF, even if net banking calls it a "statement" either way. When a bank offers both formats for the same statement, downloading the Excel/CSV version and importing it via Connected Banking's own flow is usually less work than converting a PDF — the conversion step earns its place specifically when a PDF is the only option you actually have.

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