Generic credit-card statement CSV
A downloaded transaction list for a credit-card account. People treat every row as an expense and sum "Amount" to get spend; a card is a liability, so payments, refunds, fees, and interest are mixed in and the sign is inverted from a deposit account.
The shape, how the file is really laid out
Because the account is what you owe, issuers disagree on sign: some export
charges as positive and payments/credits as negative; others invert it
(charges negative, payments positive); others split into "Debit"/"Credit"
columns. A single Amount column typically blends purchases, refunds, the
monthly payment, interest, annual/late fees, and cash advances. There is
usually no running balance. Two date columns are common, transaction date
and post date, and they can straddle the statement cutoff. An issuer-assigned
"Category" column is auto-classified and frequently wrong. Foreign
transactions show a home-currency converted amount, sometimes with the
original amount, currency, and FX rate in a memo. Pending authorizations are
excluded. A preamble or summary box may state previous balance, total
purchases, total payments/credits, fees, interest, and new balance.
The traps
"Total spend" is not Σ(Amount): a $600 payment and a $75 refund net against purchases, so the raw sum returns net cash flow, not spend, filter to purchase rows first.
- Every trap in this export, worked through
- The reconciliation anchor, the total the file asserts about itself
- The refusal cases, when to stop and ask instead of guess
Reference: generic card-issuer statement-export conventions (documented per-issuer shape only) · no real exported data