Convert a Bank Statement to Import Into Bonsai

Bonsai imports expenses by Plaid or CSV

Bonsai is the all-in-one tool many freelancers and agencies use for proposals, invoicing, and bookkeeping, and it brings expenses in two ways. The first is a live bank or card connection through Plaid, which auto-imports and categorizes spending. The second is a CSV upload, which can load expenses, clients, tracked time, and paid invoices. The CSV route is the one that matters for a bank statement, because a statement is a PDF, and converting it produces the CSV Bonsai's importer can read instead of the raw page.

The CSV expense import: template and dropdown mapping

Bonsai's CSV import follows a set path. You download the provided CSV template, prepare your file to match its format, click Include a file attachment, upload your .csv, and then map your columns using dropdown selectors so Bonsai knows which column is the date, the amount, and the description. A converted statement gives you clean, separated columns that line up against those dropdowns in a few clicks, rather than a raw export you have to reshape before the mapping will make sense.

When to convert instead of connecting

The Plaid connection is convenient but bounded: it reaches a limited stretch of history, it does not support every bank, and it only covers accounts you actually link. When you need to backfill months from before you set Bonsai up, pull in a bank it cannot connect to, or add a separate account's spending, the CSV import is the way, and a converted statement is what fills it. That keeps a freelancer's full expense picture in Bonsai, not just the window a live feed happens to reach.

Expenses, categories, and taxes

For a freelancer, the reason to get every expense into Bonsai is tax time: imported expenses get categorized so deductions are captured and the estimated tax math is right. Categorization leans on the description text, so a clean converted CSV that preserves each transaction's payee and memo gives Bonsai good signal to sort by, which means fewer expenses left uncategorized and less to fix by hand before you file a Schedule C.

Accuracy and privacy

Because these expenses drive deductions and tax figures, the amounts and dates have to be right, and every transaction is reviewable in the converter before export. The output arrives as a clean CSV ready for Bonsai's template and dropdown mapping. Since the statement holds real account activity, the file is processed to build the CSV and then deleted automatically, with nothing kept on a server afterward.

Frequently Asked Questions