How to Convert a Foreign or Multi-Currency Bank Statement to Excel

Last updated July 2026.

To convert a foreign or multi-currency bank statement, extract each transaction into a spreadsheet with the currency kept on every row, so a EUR line stays EUR and a GBP line stays GBP instead of all becoming dollars. That one detail, keeping the currency attached to each amount, is what separates a usable file from a pile of numbers you cannot trust. Once every row is labeled with its currency, you can filter, total, and split the statement to import each currency into the right account.

This comes up more than people expect. Accounts at Wise, Revolut, and Mercury hold several currency balances at once, and any US business that pays an overseas supplier or invoices a foreign client ends up with a statement that carries more than one currency. Here is how to handle it cleanly.

Why a multi-currency statement is harder than a normal one

A single-currency statement is a simple table: date, description, amount. A multi-currency statement adds a fourth dimension, the currency, and it can appear three different ways. Some statements group transactions into a section per currency. Others mix currencies line by line, so a euro payment sits right above a dollar one. The trickiest print two amounts on the same row: the original foreign amount and a converted value in your home currency, sometimes with the exchange rate the bank used.

Copy and paste cannot cope with any of that. Pasting the table into a sheet jams everything into one column, and even a rough CSV export from the bank often drops the currency code entirely, leaving you with a number like 1,200 that could be pesos, pounds, or dollars. Worse, if you feed that file straight into accounting software set to one currency, every foreign amount is read as your home currency and the balance is wrong from the first line.

Step 1: extract the statement with the currency intact

The goal of conversion is a spreadsheet where each transaction has, at minimum, a date, a description, an amount, and a currency. Upload the statement PDF to a multi-currency bank statement converter and it reads the transaction table directly, tagging each row with the currency it was printed in and keeping any converted home-currency amount as a separate column. You get a CSV or Excel file where nothing is ambiguous: EUR rows say EUR, GBP rows say GBP, and the numbers match the statement exactly. Scanned statements and password-protected PDFs convert the same way.

Step 2: split the file by currency

Because the currency is now a column, splitting the statement is one action. Sort or filter the sheet by the currency column and you have a clean block for each currency. This matters because most accounting systems hold one currency per account. You cannot import a mixed EUR-and-USD file into a single account without corrupting it, but you can import one currency at a time into the account that matches.

Step 3: import each currency into QuickBooks Online

If you use QuickBooks Online, turn on Multicurrency first. It is available on Essentials, Plus, and Advanced, but not Simple Start, and once it is on you cannot turn it off or change your home currency, so decide deliberately. Create a bank account for each currency you hold, because each QuickBooks account is locked to a single currency. Then import each split file into its matching account. QuickBooks revalues the foreign amounts to your home currency using the transaction-date rate from its own rate table. The classic mistake, and the one this whole process is designed to prevent, is importing a euro statement into a dollar account, which makes QuickBooks treat every euro as a dollar.

Which amount do you report for US taxes?

The IRS wants foreign amounts reported in US dollars, so at tax time the two figures that matter are the original transaction and its dollar value on the day it happened. When the statement already prints a converted amount, you keep it and the lookup is done. When it shows only the foreign amount, you apply the appropriate rate yourself. Either way, having the whole statement in a sortable sheet lets you total foreign income, isolate the currency-conversion fees a provider charges, and hand your accountant a file that ties back to the statement line by line. Pairing that with an expense management tool that attaches a receipt to each foreign charge closes the loop, so every conversion fee and overseas purchase has a document behind it.

A quick worked example

Say a Wise account statement shows three lines in one month: a 2,000 EUR client payment, a 480 GBP software charge, and a 1,500 USD transfer to your main bank. Converted, the sheet reads three rows, each with its own currency in the currency column. You filter to EUR and import that one row into your QuickBooks EUR account, filter to GBP for the GBP account, and the USD line goes to the dollar account. QuickBooks values the EUR and GBP lines in dollars at the day’s rate, and your books balance because no amount was ever mislabeled. Trying the same thing from a jumbled copy-paste would have booked 480 pounds as 480 dollars and quietly understated the expense.

Key takeaways

Keep the currency on every row, split the file by currency before you import, and create one account per currency in QuickBooks. Do those three things and a multi-currency statement stops being a headache. The converter does the part with no judgment in it, reading the PDF into accurate, currency-tagged rows, and leaves the account choices and rate decisions to you. To convert a statement now, use the multi-currency bank statement converter; to merge a full year of them into one file first, see how to combine bank statements in Excel; and once the data is in, categorize the transactions so foreign spending lands in the right expense buckets.