What a card statement hides
A card statement is a list of processor codes with amounts next to them. The merchant you remember is not the text on the page, and the four charges that make up a single subscription across a year look like four unrelated lines.
Credits are the other trap. A refund, a payment you made to the card, a chargeback and a cashback credit all appear as money coming in, and only one of them reduces your spending for the period. Counting them together produces a spending figure that is simply wrong.
What Karchu does with it
Transactions are extracted from the PDF or CSV, including scanned statements, and classified into purchases, refunds, payments, fees and interest. Merchant text is normalized so the same shop groups together across months and cards.
Categories are applied by rules you can read and edit, not by an opaque model. Totals by category and merchant, month against month, come out of that.
Recurring charges are detected from spacing and amount consistency, with the annual cost calculated and price increases called out. Fees and interest are separated so you can see the cost of the card itself, not just the shopping.
Foreign transactions and multi currency cards
A trip abroad usually produces two lines per purchase, the converted amount and a separate fee. Treated naively, the fee disappears into general spending and the true cost of using the card overseas is never visible.
Karchu keeps the currency with the amount and reports conversion related charges separately, so the question of what a card actually costs abroad has an answer.
Overlapping statements and duplicates
Card statement periods almost never align to calendar months, and consecutive statements often overlap. Importing both without care duplicates every transaction in the overlap and inflates every total.
Karchu fingerprints transactions on date, amount, merchant, description and account, skips the ones already imported, and tells you how many were skipped so you can inspect them rather than take it on trust.
Frequently asked questions
How do I analyze a credit card statement?
Extract the transactions into a table, separate purchases from payments, refunds, fees and interest, group the purchases by category and merchant, then compare the month with previous months. The comparison is where the useful findings are, a single month on its own rarely tells you anything.
Why are card statements harder than bank statements?
Descriptions are processor codes rather than shop names, refunds and payments both appear as credits but mean opposite things, foreign transactions carry a conversion and a fee on separate lines, and the statement period rarely matches a calendar month.
Does Karchu handle multiple cards?
Yes. Upload statements from several cards and accounts and they are analyzed together, with transfers between your own accounts recognised so a payment to the card is not counted as spending twice.
Can it find subscriptions on my card?
Yes. Recurring charges are detected from the repeat pattern rather than a list of known brands, with the monthly and annual cost shown and any price increase highlighted.
Will it catch duplicate charges?
It flags likely duplicates, the same merchant and amount within a short window, and it prevents the same transaction being imported twice when two statements overlap in period. Whether a real double charge happened is then yours to confirm with the merchant.
Do I need to give you my card login?
No. Karchu works from statement files you upload. There are no credentials to hand over and no bank connection to authorise.