Walkthrough for terminal people

Inbox to Monarch: extract a card statement with Claude Code

Your card issuer emails you a PDF once a month. Monarch wants a CSV with its own columns. The gap between those two facts is usually twenty minutes of manual data entry or a converter site you have to trust with your statement. It does not have to be either. If you already live in Claude Code, the whole thing is two prompts typed into a terminal you already have open.

The whole session

Below is a run against a statement we made up so we could publish it: Northgate Community Bank, a fictional bank, billing a fictional cardholder for a month of groceries, subscriptions and one trip. The card is invented. The results underneath it are not. That PDF went through the same production MatchLedger every account uses, and the numbers quoted here are what came back. You can download the statement and get them yourself.

Name the app you are importing into right here in the first sentence. That one clause is what turns a pile of rows into a file Monarch will take without a mapping step:

gws gmail users messages list --params '{"userId":"me",
  "q":"from:northgatecb.example has:attachment filename:pdf newer_than:60d"}'

gws gmail users messages attachments get --params '{"userId":"me",
  "messageId":"1a07489...","id":"ANGjdJ_44Hlb..."}' --output stmt.pdf

Reading the PDF is the part MatchLedger does. It takes the file, works out which rows on the page are transactions, and returns dates, descriptions and signed amounts, whether the statement carries a text layer or is a scan of a paper page. It does not care which bank or which country the statement came from. See how format support works.

The balance check is the line worth reading

Twenty-nine rows came out because twenty-nine rows went in, and MatchLedger proves that rather than asserting it: it adds up the transactions it extracted and reconciles the total against the statement's own previous and new balance. On this file the previous balance of 1,482.16 plus a net 1,306.76 lands exactly on the printed new balance of 2,788.92, so nothing was dropped, duplicated or misread. A missed row would move that number and the check would fail. How the verification works.

That is the difference between a converter and something you would put in front of an accountant. Any tool can hand you a CSV. The question is whether you can tell it is complete without checking it by hand.

Because the first prompt said Monarch, this arrives ready to import rather than as a generic table you then have to rework:

Those columns are not something the agent invented on the spot. MatchLedger publishes the import shape for each destination it supports, including the date format and which way the signs point, so a card charge lands as a charge rather than a refund. Monarch, QuickBooks Online, Xero, YNAB, Wave, FreshBooks and Zoho Books each have their own. See the export formats.

Monarch will do its own categorising on import using your rules, so treat the Category column as a starting point rather than an answer. The columns that have to be right are the date, the amount and its sign, and those are.

Optional, and worth thirty seconds the first few times. Since the Workspace CLI is already connected, the file can go straight to Drive as a spreadsheet:

gws drive +upload northgate-visa-2026-08-25.csv

gws drive files copy --params '{"fileId":"17KCFq..."}' \
  --json '{"name":"Northgate Visa 2026-08-25",
            "mimeType":"application/vnd.google-apps.spreadsheet"}'

The only part that is not the terminal. In Monarch, open the account you are importing into, choose to upload a transaction file, and pick the CSV. Monarch reads the eight columns without any mapping step because they are already the ones it asks for, then runs your rules over the merchant names.

Spot check the payment row. On a credit card it is the one line that points the other way, and it is the fastest way to see that the signs came through correctly.

The same run, pointed at QuickBooks Online

Nothing above is Monarch-specific except the last clause of the first prompt. Ask for a QuickBooks Online credit card CSV instead and the same 29 rows come out in QBO's three-column shape, which is all QuickBooks accepts for a card import: date, description, and one signed amount with charges negative.

Here is that file, from the run described above, as a public spreadsheet. Tab one is the QuickBooks shape, tab two is the Monarch shape, and the Read me tab records where the numbers came from:

View only, no sign-in. Download the PDF, run it through your own connection, and the rows you get should match the sheet line for line.

Worth knowing if you are moving a card into QuickBooks: QBO reads a credit card CSV with charges negative and payments positive, the same direction as a bank import, and getting that backwards silently turns a month of spending into a month of refunds. MatchLedger stores the statement in that convention and writes it out that way. The full QuickBooks card guide covers the import screen itself.

If these are business books, do not stop at the CSV

Everything above is extraction: getting the statement out of a PDF and into a shape your app will take. For a personal card that is the whole job. For a card that belongs to a business, it is half of one, because importing transactions does not tell you the month is right. What does is reconciling the statement against what the books already say, so you can see the charge that was never coded, the payment recorded twice, and the fee nobody entered.

MatchLedger does that half from the same terminal. Upload the card statement and the account ledger for the same period, ask for a reconciliation, and you get the matches, the exceptions on each side, and a report you can hand to whoever asks. See how the two phases fit together.

Try it on your own statement

1. Wire up the two connections once: Gmail and MatchLedger in Claude Code.
2. Type the prompts from this page, with your own issuer name and your own app in the first one.
3. Read the balance check before you import anything. If it did not verify, ask why rather than importing and finding out in the reconcile screen.
4. If your issuer is not one MatchLedger has seen before, it is still read the same way, and you can ask us to add the format.

Common questions

Keep reading

• Connect Gmail and MatchLedger to Claude Code. The one-time setup this page assumes you already did.
• Import a credit card statement into QuickBooks Online. The same job for business books, including the QuickBooks import screen itself.
• How the balance check works. Why a row count is not proof, and what MatchLedger checks instead.
• MatchLedger for Claude Code and Codex. The short version, if you only want the connection command.

Claude and Claude Code are products of Anthropic. Monarch, QuickBooks Online, Gmail and Google Sheets are products of their respective owners. MatchLedger is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them. Northgate Community Bank and the cardholder in the sample statement are invented; no real account, person or transaction appears on this page.