Bank Statements for Self Assessment

1. Pull 6 April to 5 April, then cut the ends

For 2025/26 you want everything dated 6 April 2025 to 5 April 2026 inclusive. Almost no bank issues a statement on those boundaries, so download one extra period at each end and trim in the spreadsheet rather than trying to be clever at the download step. In practice that means pulling April 2025 through April 2026 and deleting two short stretches once the data is in columns you can sort by date.

Sort by date before you trim. A statement exported from online banking is not always in date order, and a trim done on row position instead of on the date is the mistake that quietly drops a week.

2. Decide which accounts are in scope

• The business account, if you keep one. This is the spine of the self-employment pages.
• Any personal account used for business, even occasionally. A single client payment into a personal current account still belongs in the turnover figure, and it is the one most often missed.
• Savings accounts. Interest has been paid without tax deducted since 2016, so the gross amount is yours to declare against your Personal Savings Allowance, which is £1,000, £500 or nothing depending on the band you land in.
• Joint accounts, usually split 50/50 unless you have told HMRC otherwise. Take the whole year and halve it rather than trying to attribute individual entries.
• Accounts closed during the year, which stop being downloadable the moment online access ends. Get those out early.

3. Two changes worth checking against your own position

Basis periods. Self-employed profits are now reported on a tax-year basis rather than on an accounting period ending in the year, so an accounting date that is not 5 April means apportioning across two sets of accounts. If your year end is already 31 March or 5 April this changes nothing for you.

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax. It began phasing in from April 2026, starting with the highest qualifying income band, and lower thresholds are scheduled to follow. Where it applies, one annual look at your statements is replaced by quarterly updates, which makes a repeatable statement-to-spreadsheet routine worth building now rather than in January. Whether you are in the current phase depends on your own qualifying income, so check that against HMRC's guidance rather than assuming either way.

4. UK statement layouts, and the one that breaks spreadsheets

UK statements typically use DD/MM/YYYY dates and split money across separate Paid In and Paid Out columns instead of one signed Amount column. Both conventions cause trouble downstream:

• Dates. A spreadsheet opened on a machine set to US locale reads 04/05/2026 as 5 April in one column and 4 May in another, depending on which values are ambiguous. Set the column format explicitly to DMY rather than trusting the import, and see the Excel cleanup guide for the Text to Columns route that fixes a whole column at once.
• Two money columns. Most accounting software wants one signed column, positive in and negative out. Combining Paid In and Paid Out is a two-formula job, also covered in that guide.
• Accounting software region settings. If the return feeds into bookkeeping software, the date order it expects comes from the organisation's own region setting, not from your file. The Xero import guide covers where that is set and what a mismatch looks like.

5. Keep the working file, not just the return

HMRC generally expects self-employed records to be kept until at least five years after the 31 January submission deadline for the relevant year, which for 2025/26 runs well into the 2030s. Company records run on a different clock. The practical version: keep the converted spreadsheet next to the original PDFs, named by account and tax year, because the spreadsheet is the thing you can search and the PDF is the thing that proves it.

A spreadsheet also survives a bank's own retention policy. Online banking commonly keeps somewhere between one and seven years of statements available, and an account you close takes its history with it.

Convert your statement first

Turn a PDF statement into a clean spreadsheet with typed Date, Description, Debit, Credit, Amount and Balance columns, ready to sort and trim to the tax year. Paid In and Paid Out are normalised into those same columns, which is what lets two accounts at different banks line up in one sheet. Digital PDFs are parsed in your browser and never uploaded; a scan is read by on-device OCR, and an unreadable page goes to cloud OCR only if you explicitly approve it.

All UK banks → · Convert a statement now →

Filing elsewhere this season? See bank statements for a US tax return and bank statements for ITR filing.