Bank statement to QuickBooks

From the arithmetic, not from the heading. In a real statement the balance after each row equals the balance before it plus or minus that row’s amount. Only the true amount column satisfies that across the whole page, so it is found by testing rather than assumed. You are told what share of rows agreed.

The same way. Roughly half of statements print amounts without a minus sign and rely on a separate column, or on you reading the balance. We take the sign from the direction the balance moved, so a row is negative because the balance went down, not because we guessed from the wording.

It is written as OFX 1.0.2 SGML with the Intuit tags QuickBooks Desktop expects, and the payee field is stripped of the characters that cause error OL-222 (asterisk, full stop, comma, colon, slash and double spaces). The bank name QuickBooks shows comes from the file and is cosmetic — you choose the real account while importing.

Yes. A page with no text layer is read with OCR inside this page, so the scan is never uploaded either. The first scanned file is slower because the OCR engine downloads once. Whatever OCR reads still has to satisfy the running balance before it is written into the file.

A date written 03/04 is either 3 April or 4 March and no amount of cleverness settles it. If nothing in the statement gives the order away, you are asked before the file is written rather than after it is in your books. Where a date has no year at all, you are asked for that too.