Convert a Mettle statement to checked Excel

Mettle is the free business account NatWest built for sole traders and the smallest limited companies, and it comes with FreeAgent bookkeeping bundled in. That helps day to day, but plenty of Mettle users still hand their year to an outside accountant, or want the figures in a different package — and for that the statement has to leave the app as rows, not a PDF.

What's on a Mettle statement

A Mettle statement lists business activity with a date, the payee, the amount and a running balance. Two Mettle features shape it:

• Pots. Mettle lets you split money into pots — a common one is setting aside tax — and moving money into a pot shows as a transfer. Those stay on their own rows so money you've reserved isn't counted as spending.
• Invoice and payment detail. Payments carry a reference, and card spending shows a readable merchant, so income and costs stay identifiable when it's time to categorise.

A longer description can wrap onto a second line, and a plain PDF export reads that overflow as its own row. The converter joins it back so each payment is one clean transaction.

Free bookkeeping, and why you'd still convert

Mettle is unusual in bundling FreeAgent accounting for free — NatWest picks up the tab — so a fair few users assume they never need to touch the raw statement. In practice you do. An accountant who works in a different system wants the bank data their way; a mortgage or finance application wants a plain statement, not a bookkeeping export; and it's worth being able to check what FreeAgent categorised against the actual account. Converting the Mettle PDF to a spreadsheet gives you that neutral copy — the transactions as they happened, reconciled to the balance — independent of whatever the bundled software did with them.

Where to find your Mettle statement

1. Open the Mettle app, go to the account, and open Statements.
2. Choose the month or a date range and export the PDF. Mettle can also produce a CSV.
3. Save the file, then upload it here.

Because Mettle generates the PDF itself, the text is clean and the conversion is exact. If you've only been sent a scan or a screenshot, the converter reads it with OCR.

Getting it into your books

• Excel or Google Sheets — one row per transaction with real numbers, ready to total and filter.
• QuickBooks, Xero or FreeAgent — an import-ready file so the lines land as bank entries to reconcile.
• Zoho and others — the same clean data in each one's format.

Every figure is reconciled before download: opening balance, plus money in, minus money out, has to equal the closing balance. For a sole trader pulling a year together for Self Assessment, that check means the numbers add up rather than nearly adding up.

Common snags with Mettle statements

• Pot transfers. Money moved into a pot stays on its own row, separate from your spending.
• Payment references kept. References stay with the transaction so income matches the invoice it settled.
• CSV vs PDF. Mettle can give you a CSV, but if all you have is the PDF, the converter turns it into the same clean rows.