Frequently asked questions
Everything people usually ask before signing up for Karchu - supported formats, categorization, security, pricing, and how it compares to the alternatives.
What does the name Karchu mean?
Karchu comes from the Telugu word ఖర్చు (kharchu), meaning "expense" or "cost." The name was chosen because it directly describes what the product does: turn bank statement transactions into a clear, categorized picture of your expenses. It is unrelated to other uses of the word "karchu" elsewhere online, such as an old Tibetan manuscript catalogue or place names in Bhutan, Russia, and Armenia.
What is a bank statement analyzer?
A bank statement analyzer is a tool that reads statement files from your bank (CSV, Excel, or PDF), extracts the individual transactions, categorizes them, and turns them into charts and reports. Karchu is a bank statement analyzer built for individuals, freelancers, and small teams - it works without connecting directly to your bank.
What bank statement formats does Karchu support?
CSV, XLSX, XLS, PDF (including scanned PDFs via on-device OCR), and plain TXT exports. Files up to 25 MB each. You can queue multiple statements at once; Karchu deduplicates overlapping transactions across statements automatically.
Can Karchu convert a PDF bank statement to Excel?
Yes. Upload the PDF, let Karchu extract the transactions, then export the result as CSV or Excel. The exported file has clean columns for date, description, merchant, debit, credit, and balance - no post-processing needed to import into QuickBooks, Xero, or a personal spreadsheet.
How does automatic categorization work?
Karchu ships with a deterministic rule engine. Rules match on merchant name, description keywords, amount ranges, and account type. Sensible defaults cover common merchants out of the box; you extend the rules by editing one entry, and every matching transaction - past and future - updates immediately.
Do you use AI to categorize transactions?
The default engine is rule-based, not AI. That means categorization is deterministic and editable - the same input always gives the same output, and you can see exactly why a transaction landed in a given category. AI is available for optional tasks like receipt line-item extraction on higher-tier plans.
Does Karchu connect to my bank account directly?
No. Karchu never asks for your bank login and doesn’t use bank-aggregation services like Plaid. You bring the statement files; Karchu does the analysis. That trade-off is deliberate - it keeps the tool safe to use for sensitive business finances and easy to adopt inside regulated organizations.
Is my financial data private?
Yes. Files live in your private workspace. Every database read is scoped to your organization at the row level, so users in other workspaces cannot see your data. See the security page for details on encryption, roles, and deletion.
Can I use Karchu with my team?
Yes. Each organization supports multiple members with granular roles - owner, manager, accountant, analyst, employee, viewer. Invite teammates by email; they see only what their role allows.
How much does Karchu cost?
There’s a 30-day free trial on every paid plan. Pricing details, plan limits, and what’s included live on the pricing page. You can cancel at any time from Settings → Billing; access continues until the end of the current billing period.
Can I export my transactions?
Yes, at any time, on every plan. Export any view - a category, a date range, a single account, or the whole workspace - to CSV or Excel with one click.
How is Karchu different from a spreadsheet?
A spreadsheet gives you rows; Karchu gives you rows plus categorization, dashboards, and multi-statement dedupe - all reusable across future statements. You stop rewriting formulas every month.
How is Karchu different from QuickBooks or Xero?
QuickBooks and Xero are full accounting suites with invoicing, payroll, and bookkeeping. Karchu focuses on one thing: turning statements into a clear, categorized picture of where money went. It complements - rather than replaces - a full ledger, and exports cleanly into both.
What is the daily recap and when does it arrive?
The daily recap is a short weekday summary of the last 24 hours: what you spent, what came in, your net flow, the top category and merchant, and anything sitting with low confidence that needs a quick review. It goes out at 9:00 AM in your own timezone, which Karchu detects the first time you sign in and which you can change under Settings, Notifications.
Can I get the recap inside the app instead of by email?
Yes. Email and in-app are separate channels. The same recap is posted to your notifications inbox, marked read or unread, so you can keep the in-app version on and turn the email off (or the other way round). Open the bell in the top bar, or go to Settings, Notifications and use the Recaps only filter to see just the digests.
Do you track whether I open the recap email?
We record whether a recap was delivered, opened, and clicked, plus whether the click brought you back into the app. It is aggregate product measurement used to decide which recap content is actually useful. We do not sell it, share it with advertisers, or use it to profile you. If you would rather not be counted, turning off the recap email stops it entirely.
Can I ask Karchu questions about my own statements?
Yes. Ask Karchu answers plain language questions such as what you spent on software last quarter, which vendors cost the most, or how this month compares with last month. Every answer is computed from your own transactions and shows the rows behind the figure, so nothing is taken on trust. It is available on Pro, Business and Enterprise.
Does Karchu forecast cash flow?
Karchu projects 30, 60 and 90 days ahead from your own history and the recurring charges it has detected. At least three complete months of statements are needed before a projection is shown, and every figure is labelled as an estimate rather than a guarantee.
Can Karchu find my subscriptions and recurring charges?
Yes. Karchu groups transactions by normalized merchant and looks for a consistent interval and amount, then shows the frequency, the typical amount, the next expected payment, the monthly equivalent and the annual cost. Because each charge keeps its payment history, a price increase appears as a step change with the date it happened.
What happens when Karchu is unsure about a transaction?
It is sent to review rather than saved silently. Low confidence rows, unreadable fields and statements whose balances do not reconcile are all flagged, and the review screen shows the original document beside the extracted rows so you can check a figure against its source and correct it.
Does Karchu import the same transaction twice from overlapping statements?
No. When two statements cover some of the same days, Karchu compares date, amount, normalized merchant, account and source document, and reports how many overlapping rows it skipped. The skipped rows can be inspected before the import completes, so nothing is dropped without you seeing it.
Can I attach receipts to transactions?
Yes. Upload a receipt or invoice and Karchu reads the merchant, date, subtotal, tax, tip, total, currency and line items where they are legible, then links it to the matching transaction using amount, date, merchant, account and time proximity. The confidence of each match is shown and every link can be changed or removed.
What reports can I download?
An executive summary plus category, merchant, cash flow, transaction, recurring expense, project and tax oriented expense reports, available as PDF and spreadsheet downloads. Tax oriented reports are marked as estimates, since a report generated from statements is a preparation aid and not a tax filing.
Does Karchu claim to be 100 percent accurate?
No, and any tool that does is overstating it. Accuracy depends on the document: a clean digital PDF extracts far more reliably than a phone photograph of a creased receipt. Karchu instead validates what it extracted against the statement's own balances, scores each field, and routes anything uncertain to human review.