If you work in conveyancing, you already know the drill. Before a property transaction can complete, you need to verify where your client's money is coming from. That means bank statements. Lots of them.
Why Conveyancing Requires Bank Statements
Anti-money laundering regulations require conveyancing solicitors to prove the source of funds for every property purchase. It's not enough for a client to say they have the money — you need documentary evidence showing where it came from.
This applies to:
- Savings — statements showing the balance building over time
- Gifts — a clear transfer from the giftor's account, matched with a gift letter
- Property sales — completion funds arriving from a previous transaction
- Inheritance — distributions from an estate account
Cash deposits are a red flag. Unexplained lump sums are a red flag. Gaps in the statement history are a red flag. Your job is to make sure none of these end up unexplained in the file.
The Problem with PDF Statements
Some clients connect via open banking. But many still send PDF statements — downloaded from online banking, scanned from paper, or photographed on a phone. You might receive statements from every major UK bank, plus smaller ones like NS&I, building societies, or overseas accounts.
When you're reviewing these manually, you're doing two things at once: reading through every transaction looking for anything that needs explaining, and mentally reconstructing the account's story. For a straightforward purchase with savings from one account, that's manageable. For a client with multiple accounts, gifted deposits, and six months of history per account, it becomes a serious time sink.
The real risk isn't the time. It's missing something. A cash deposit buried on page four. A transfer in that doesn't match the gift letter amount. A gap between statement periods that means you're not seeing the full picture.
What Accuracy Means Here
When conveyancing lawyers talk about accuracy, they mean something specific. It's not just "are the numbers roughly right." It's:
- Every transaction accounted for — no missing rows, no merged entries
- Balances that verify — if you add up the transactions, do you arrive at the closing balance?
- Dates that are correct — because the timeline of funds matters for compliance
- Amounts that are exact — a gift of £50,000 that shows as £5,000 in your records is a serious problem
This is why some firms recalculate balances from the extracted data — it's the quickest way to confirm that every transaction has been captured correctly.
How Barclays Statement Converter Helps
We built Barclays Statement Converter to turn bank statement PDFs and images into structured, accurate transaction data. Upload a statement, get back a spreadsheet with dates, descriptions, amounts in, amounts out, and balances — ready for review.
For conveyancing work specifically, this means:
- Any bank, any format — we handle statements from high street banks, building societies, challenger banks, and overseas institutions
- Photos and scans — clients don't always send clean PDFs; we process images too
- Balance integrity — we extract balances as they appear on the statement, so you can verify completeness
- Each transaction on its own row — no merged entries, no summaries, just clean data you can review and filter
Once you have the data in Excel, you can sort by amount to find large deposits, filter for cash entries, cross-reference gift amounts against letters, and confirm that statement periods are continuous with no gaps.
Source of Funds in Practice
A typical conveyancing source of funds check might involve:
- Six months of current account statements from the buyer
- A savings account showing the deposit amount
- Statements from a parent's account showing the gift transfer
- A corresponding gift letter
That could be 30+ pages of statements across multiple banks and formats. Converting them all into structured data means you can work through the verification systematically instead of flipping between PDFs and making notes.