How Karchu turns raw bank statements into financial clarity
Karchu is a bank statement analyzer that takes the messy files your bank hands you and converts them into categorized transactions, cash-flow charts, and clean exports. Four steps, no spreadsheets, no manual coding.
The four-step flow
From upload to exportable insights, here is exactly what happens.
- Step 1• ~10 seconds
Upload any bank statement
Drop the file your bank actually gives you. No template setup, no column mapping.
- CSV, XLSX, XLS, PDF, or TXT, up to 25 MB per file
- Scanned PDFs handled with on-device OCR
- Queue multiple files at once, duplicates are removed
- Step 2• ~20 seconds
Parse and normalize
Karchu detects the column layout, aligns dates, and rebuilds every row into a consistent shape.
- Dates aligned to ISO regardless of source format
- Debit and credit columns merged with correct signs
- Multi-currency statements keep their original currency
- Step 3• ~30 seconds
Categorize with rules
A deterministic rule engine tags every transaction. Edit a rule once and it applies retroactively.
- Match on merchant, keyword, amount range, or account
- Ships with sensible defaults for common merchants
- No AI guesswork, same input always produces same output
- Step 4• instant
Review, export, or collaborate
Live dashboards update in real time. Export clean files or invite teammates.
- Income, cash flow, top merchants, category breakdowns
- One-click export to CSV, Excel, QBO, or OFX
- Private workspace with per-role access for your team
What Karchu accepts
Most tools force you to convert a PDF bank statement to Excel first. Karchu skips that step and reads what your bank actually sent you.
Common banks that work out of the box
Files are capped at 25 MB, which comfortably covers year-long statements. Overlapping months are deduplicated automatically.
Every row, one consistent shape
One bank exports dates as DD/MM/YYYY, another as YYYY-MM-DD. Amounts land in split columns, signed columns, or "money in / money out" pairs. Karchu detects the layout and produces a single normalized row shape.
Rules, not guesswork
Most services either force you to hand-categorize every row, or hand transactions to an opaque AI model and hope it guesses correctly. Karchu uses a deterministic rule engine instead.
- Merchant name
- Description keywords
- Amount ranges
- Account type
Edit once, apply retroactively
Ships with sensible defaults for merchants like Uber, Amazon, Netflix, and Starbucks. Extend the engine by editing a rule once. Every matching transaction, past and future, updates immediately.
That is the answer to the recurring question, "how do you categorize bank transactions without redoing the work every month?" You don't. The rules do.
Live dashboard and clean exports
Once transactions land, every view updates in real time as you refine rules. Filter by account, category, date range, or merchant, then export in one click.
Who Karchu is for
Anyone who needs to understand money without surrendering control. Role-based workspaces keep sensitive views scoped to the right people.
Individuals
Understand where your money went last quarter. No spreadsheets, no guesswork.
Freelancers and sole traders
Keep clean books for tax season without hiring a full-time bookkeeper.
Small teams
Share a workspace where founders, accountants, and analysts see the same numbers.
Step 5: stay on top of it without logging in every day
Analysis only helps if you actually look at it. Karchu sends a short daily recap covering the last 24 hours: what you spent, what came in, your net flow, the top category and merchant, and how many transactions are still sitting at low confidence waiting for a quick review.
Recaps go out at 9:00 AM in your own timezone on weekdays. Karchu detects that timezone from your browser the first time you sign in, and you can change it (or pin it to UTC) under Settings, Notifications. Weekly and monthly summaries follow the same local-time rule.
Every recap is also posted to your in-app notifications inbox with a read status, so a missed or filtered email does not mean a missed recap. Open the bell in the top bar, or use the Recaps only filter on the notifications page to see just the digests. Email and in-app are separate switches, so keep whichever one fits how you work and turn the other off.
What Karchu is not
Karchu is not a bank aggregator. It does not ask for your bank credentials. It does not connect through Plaid or Yodlee. It does not sit between you and your bank.
You bring the files. Karchu does the analysis. That trade-off is deliberate. It makes the tool safe to use for sensitive business finances and easy to adopt inside regulated organizations.