Free Bank CSV Validator

Check a bank CSV file before you import it into accounting software, a spreadsheet, or a budgeting app. The validator reads your file, flags rows and columns that could break the import, and shows a report so you can fix problems first.

What it checks

• Valid dates — every row has a date that parses into a real calendar date and follows one consistent format across the file.
• Numeric amounts — amount fields contain numbers, not stray text, currency symbols, or blank cells where a value is expected.
• Consistent debit and credit — money-in and money-out columns line up the same way on every row, so an outgoing transaction is never read as income.
• Duplicate headers — repeated or shifted header rows pasted into the middle of the data are caught before they become bad transactions.
• Encoding — confirms the file decodes as valid UTF-8 (it flags files that don't). Note it can't recover which legacy encoding a bank originally used — only that the bytes are valid UTF-8.

How it works

1. Upload your bank CSV.
2. The validator scans every row and produces a validation report listing each issue and the row it appears on.
3. Fix the flagged rows in your spreadsheet editor.
4. Re-check the corrected file until the report comes back clean.

Why validate first

A single malformed date or a misplaced header can cause an import to fail halfway, or worse, load silently with wrong numbers that you only discover during reconciliation. Validating up front means you catch those problems while they are still easy to fix, instead of unwinding them later.

This pairs well with the free bank statement converter, which turns a PDF statement into CSV rows. Once you have a CSV, run it through the validator to confirm the columns and values are clean before import.

New to working with CSV exports? Read bank statement to CSV for an overview of the format and the fields a typical bank file contains, and convert PDF bank statement to CSV for the steps to get a CSV out of a PDF in the first place.

Validation does not change your data — it only reports what it finds, so you stay in control of every edit. Run it as often as you need until the file is ready to import.