Convert a American Express statement PDF to Excel or CSV

What an Amex statement PDF looks like

American Express statements are fundamentally different from a bank checking statement, because a credit card statement isn’t tracking a running cash balance — it’s tracking charges against a credit line. An Amex statement opens with a summary box (Previous Balance, Payments, Credits, New Charges, Fees, Interest Charged, New Balance) and then lists individual charges chronologically with a date, merchant description, and amount — but no running balance column threading through the transaction list the way a checking account statement has. The “balance” that matters is the single New Balance figure in the summary box, not a per-row running total.

Amex statements for small-business cards (Business Platinum, Business Gold) often add a “Spend by category” or expense-category breakdown page, and statements covering multiple employee cards on one account list each cardholder’s charges in its own labeled section.

Where to download it

In the Amex online account center or app, go to Statements & Activity and select Statement for the billing period you want. PDF statements are typically available for a couple of years of account history through the online portal, with older history available on request.

Date format and columns

Amex prints a MM/DD/YY transaction date (and sometimes a separate “date posted” alongside the transaction date) with a merchant description and a single amount per charge — positive for charges, negative for payments and credits — but again, no per-row balance column.

Common issues when converting

Because there’s no running balance to check row-by-row, the reconciliation approach that works for a checking account doesn’t directly apply — instead, the meaningful check is whether the sum of all charges and payments/credits, added to the Previous Balance, equals the New Balance printed in the summary box. That’s a single end-to-end check rather than a row-by-row chain, and it’s still worth doing before relying on an exported spreadsheet, since a misread charge amount is just as easy to miss without a per-row balance to catch it against.

For multi-cardholder business accounts, keep each cardholder’s section separate when categorizing or reporting on the data — combining charges from different cardholders into one undifferentiated list loses information that’s often specifically why a business wanted per-card statements in the first place.