How to convert a State Bank of India bank statement into Tally

Step 1

Download your State Bank of India statement as a PDF

In OnlineSBI (or the YONO app), go to Account Statement, choose the account and date range, and download the PDF. Make sure you export a text-based PDF — the kind net banking generates natively — rather than a scan or photo of a printed statement. Scanned images aren't machine-readable text; no converter, bank2tally included, can read those reliably yet, and it's better to know that before you upload than after.

Step 2

What's actually on a State Bank of India statement

State Bank of India e-statements print these columns, dates like “1 Apr 2026”:

Txn Date · Value Date · Description · Ref No./Cheque No. · Debit · Credit · Balance

OnlineSBI statements put a Value Date column next to the transaction date; bank2tally reads the transaction date so your vouchers post on the right day.

State Bank of India follows the same general narration conventions as most Indian banks — NEFT, RTGS, IMPS or UPI codes identifying the transfer type, a cheque number where a physical cheque was used, and a running balance printed after every line.

Reading the narration

Transaction codes you'll see on almost any Indian bank statement

Bank narrations are terse by design, but the codes themselves are standard across banks, not bank-specific:

• NEFT — National Electronic Funds Transfer, a same-day batched transfer between banks.
• RTGS — Real Time Gross Settlement, for large-value transfers settled individually and immediately, usually above ₹2 lakh.
• IMPS — Immediate Payment Service, instant transfers available 24/7, typically for smaller amounts than RTGS.
• UPI — Unified Payments Interface, the handle- or QR-based transfers most retail payment apps use.
• ATM / POS — a cash withdrawal, or a card swipe at a point-of-sale terminal.
• CHQ / Chq No. — a cheque transaction, referenced by its cheque number rather than a digital transfer ID.
• B/F — “brought forward”, the opening balance carried over from the previous statement period.
• SI — a standing instruction: an automatic recurring payment you've already set up with the bank.

None of this changes how bank2tally maps a line to a ledger — the narration is matched against your rules regardless of which code it starts with — but recognising the code helps you sanity-check anything that lands in Suspense after import. See our guide to the Suspense ledger for how to clear those.

Step 3

Convert the PDF and import it into Tally Prime

Upload the statement on bank2tally and select State Bank of India — every row is read against its real column positions, not a generic PDF-table guess, then mapped to a ledger by narration. Anything unrecognised is posted to a Suspense ledger instead of being guessed at, so nothing is silently wrong in your books. Download the resulting XML and, in Tally Prime, go to Gateway of Tally → Import → Vouchers and select the file. The Payment and Receipt vouchers it creates are already balanced, so there's nothing further to reconcile before you start reviewing them line by line.

If Tally reports an error on import — a missing ledger, a voucher landing outside your financial year, or a duplicate from re-importing the same file — the fixes are usually quick; see our Tally XML import errors guide for the exact cause of each.

Why bank2tally

Built against State Bank of India's real layout, not a guess

Generic PDF-table extractors guess at columns from whitespace alone, and often get a layout like SBI's wrong — flipping a debit for a credit, or losing a balance figure to a stray column. bank2tally's SBI parser is built against State Bank of India's actual column positions, so the figures it hands to Tally match what's printed on the statement, not what a generic algorithm assumed should be there.

Other banks

Convert another bank's statement

Questions