Now reading UK bank statements, in pounds
MetrikData analyses business bank statements from any UK bank. Upload the PDF and the report comes back in pounds sterling: every transaction captured, the daily balance rebuilt, revenue separated from money that merely landed, every funder position found with its burden on the account, and a risk score. The currency is read off the page, and with it everything a British statement does differently.
- Any UK bank, digital PDF or scan
- Positions, burden, revenue and balance in £
- YouLend, iwoca, Capify, Liberis and other UK funders recognised
The same report, read the British way
A British statement is not an American one with a different symbol in front of the numbers. The layout rhymes, but the date is written day first, the payments arrive on rails with different names, the merchant’s takings come from a different set of card acquirers, the tax collector has a different name, and a bounced payment is not called an NSF. Read it as though it were American and the arithmetic still adds up, on the wrong month’s transactions.
So the reader now settles the statement’s currency from the marks printed on the page, and the currency names the country. From there every reading that depends on the country changes with it: how dates are parsed, which words are channel noise, whose settlements count as revenue, which payments are tax, and what the report calls a returned item. The underwriter sees one report, in pounds, that means what it says.
Five things a British statement does differently
Each of these moves a number. Each is handled on its own terms rather than as a special case of the US reading.
The date is day first
05/09 is the fifth of September on a UK statement and the ninth of May on a US one. The date order follows the country, so a quarter of transactions no longer land in the wrong month, and the period, the trend and the month-by-month revenue come out on the right calendar.
The rails are named differently, and the names are noise
Direct Debit, Faster Payment, BACS, CHAPS, Standing Order, Bank Giro Credit. None of these say who was paid; they name the channel. They are treated as noise when payments are grouped by counterparty, so one funder collecting by Direct Debit under two mandate references reads as one funder, not two.
Card takings arrive from a different set of acquirers
Worldpay, Dojo, SumUp, Zettle, Takepayments, Paymentsense, DNA Payments, Teya, Elavon, Barclaycard, Global Payments, Tyl by NatWest, and delivery platforms such as Just Eat, Deliveroo and Uber Eats. Their settlements are the merchant’s own sales. Miss them and revenue is understated, so every burden ratio reads high on a business that is doing fine.
The tax collector is HMRC
VAT, PAYE, Corporation Tax and the accounting-office references HMRC prints on a Direct Debit are read as tax, alongside NEST pension contributions. They are never mistaken for a funder collecting, and never counted against the business as debt service.
A bounced payment is “unpaid”
A UK bank prints unpaid or returned where a US bank prints NSF. Both mean the account could not cover what was presented, and both land in the same place in the report, under the word a UK funder actually reads on a statement.
UK funders in the registry, collecting the UK way
The funder registry that makes a position deterministic on a US statement now carries the UK market: YouLend, iwoca, Capify, Liberis, 365 Business Finance, Merchant Money, Nucleus Commercial Finance, Fleximize, Bizcap, Uncapped, Wayflyer, Swiftfund, Boost Capital and Got Capital among the advance providers, and Funding Circle, Kriya and Close Brothers among the lenders. A payment to any of them is named as a position and typed as an advance or a loan without a model having to guess.
A UK funder collects by Direct Debit or Bacs rather than ACH, so there is no originator field to read. The reader treats a Direct Debit mandate as the collection rail it is, which is what lets a registered funder taking a few hundred pounds a week surface as the position it is instead of disappearing under the small-item floor.
Money between the business and a named person carrying a “loan” reference is read for what it is: a personal loan, kept visible, never counted as sales on the way in or as a funder on the way out. The funder list keeps growing through the same review as the US list; a funder we have not met yet is still found by its behaviour on the account.
Running a UK file
Upload the statement
From any page of the workspace, drop the PDF or choose it. Three to six months for one merchant works best; a batch of up to fifteen statements queues in one go. Scanned statements are read the same way, with the printed totals as the answer key.
The currency is read off the page
The £ marks, the ISO code or the words “pounds sterling” settle the currency; the currency settles the country. Nothing to select, and a statement whose currency cannot be read says so rather than guessing.
Read the report in pounds
Revenue, positions, burden, headroom, daily balances and the returned-items count all come back in £, with the thresholds that decide what counts as a material item set for pounds rather than converted from dollars.
Correct anything, free
A misread line is retagged in the report and the whole analysis is re-derived from the corrected rows. No credit is spent on a recalculation.
What is claimed, and what is not
Everything above rests on one fact the statement itself carries: its currency. When the page does not make its currency readable, the country is not known, and the report records the assumption as an assumption instead of hardening it into a fact nobody declared. A document showing two currencies is reported as exactly that.
The reader takes bank statements as PDFs, the documents a funder is actually handed. Open Banking feeds and CSV exports are not the same evidence and are not read. And the country is a property of the statement, not of the account: a UK workspace uploading a US file gets the US reading, and the other way round. The design is described in One statement, two countries.
Common questions
Which UK banks are supported?
Any UK bank. The reader works from the statement PDF, digital or scanned, rather than from a per-bank template, so a high-street bank, a challenger and a business current account from a fintech are all read the same way.
Do I need to tell the system a statement is British?
No. The currency is read from the page, and the country follows from it. A workspace can hold US and UK merchants side by side.
Does a UK statement cost more credits?
No. A statement costs the same whatever its currency: most cost one or two credits, long ones three, and a scanned or photographed statement one more.
Which UK funders does it recognise?
The registry carries the UK advance and lending market, including YouLend, iwoca, Capify, Liberis, 365 Business Finance, Merchant Money, Nucleus Commercial Finance, Fleximize, Bizcap, Uncapped, Wayflyer, Funding Circle, Kriya and Close Brothers, and it grows through review. A funder not yet listed is still found by how it collects.
Can it read Open Banking data or a CSV export?
Not today. The evidence a funder is handed is the bank statement itself, so the reader takes PDF statements only.
Related
Underwrite a UK file today
Upload a statement from any UK bank. The currency, the rails and the funders are read off the page.