How Irish banks give you your statements
| Bank | eStatements online | Default frequency | Built-in export |
|---|---|---|---|
| AIB | Seven years | Annually for current accounts, unless you ask for more | CSV, previous two years |
| Bank of Ireland | Seven years for open accounts | Monthly, quarterly or yearly by account | CSV, up to 12 months; no credit card export |
The exports cover one to two years, and Bank of Ireland can't export credit card transactions at all. An annual AIB statement holds a full year of transactions in a single PDF. For anything older, a full statement period, or a client's PDFs, the statement is the source.
What Revenue expects you to keep
- Six years. Revenue says it's generally necessary to retain records for six years from the date of the transaction they relate to, and longer in some cases, such as when a return wasn't filed.
- Bank statements are supporting documents. Revenue names "bank and building society statements" among the linking documents that support your records.
- Keeping statements isn't keeping books. Revenue says that simply keeping documents like bank statements doesn't fulfil the requirement to maintain proper books and records.
- VAT. Revenue lists bank statements among VAT records, kept for six years.
- Electronic is fine, provided the record keeps its integrity, can be shown or printed in an intelligible format, and can be accessed readily.
Personal bank statements that relate only to personal transactions aren't business records, according to Revenue.
Importing into Irish accounting software
- A CSV needs at least a date and an amount.
- Xero asks you to confirm the date format when dates could be read more than one way.
- Accepts a 3-column (date, description, amount) or 4-column (date, description, credit, debit) CSV.
- Recommends dd/mm/yyyy, files in English of 350 KB or less, and up to 1,000 lines per upload.
Sage Accounting
- Import a statement from Banking › Actions › Import statement when you don't have a bank feed, or for history the feed doesn't cover.
- Select the date format your file uses. Sage can't import foreign currency statements, or transactions from before your accounts start date.
Converting an Irish bank statement
- Upload your PDF statements. Batch upload handles a year of statements at once.
- Pick the output: Excel, CSV, JSON, Xero CSV, or QuickBooks 3- or 4-column CSV.
- Download one transaction per row, with dates day-first and amounts in euro.
Credit card statements, including Bank of Ireland cards that can't be exported, convert with the credit card statement converter.