Getting your bank statements ready for your CA
Most of the back-and-forth between a taxpayer and their CA in filing season is about missing statements: a month that wasn't downloaded, an account that was forgotten, a password nobody remembers. A little preparation avoids nearly all of it.
Download the whole financial year
The Indian financial year runs from 1 April to 31 March. For each bank account and credit card, download statements covering the full year. Statements that overlap at the edges are fine; gaps are not.
LekhaLens checks the dates of what you upload and shows missing months per account, so a gap is visible before your CA finds it.
Prefer CSV or Excel, accept PDF
Most net-banking portals offer a statement as CSV or Excel, and that is the most reliable format to upload. PDF statements work too, including password-protected ones — LekhaLens asks for the password in your browser and never sends it to our servers. Scanned, image-only PDFs can be read with OCR, but check the rows it finds before importing.
Have a year of monthly files? Put them in a .zip and upload them together. Each file is listed for you to review, and monthly files from the same account default to the same account name.
One account, one name
Give each account a clear, stable name when you upload — for example HDFC Savings 1234 or ICICI Credit Card. Using the same name every time keeps each account's statements together, and your CA can see at a glance which account a transaction came from.
Upload card statements as card statements
Choose the credit card type when uploading a card statement. Payments you make to the card are then recognised as bill payments rather than income, so a ₹50,000 card payment doesn't read as ₹50,000 earned.
What to send your CA
Once the statements are in and classified, export the Excel workbook. It contains a summary laid out the way a CA builds one by hand, a flat list of every transaction, and a debits-then-credits sheet — everything they need to review the year without asking for the raw files again.