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PDF Statement Extraction - Setup Guide

2 min read

I was trying to get claude to look at my bank statements

I make more than I spend and a fucked amount of that spend is on alcohol and cigarettes, time well spent on something I already knew.

here’s his notes.

Workflow to allow Claude to read PDF bank statements directly from the vault via MCP, without needing to upload them manually in chat.

How It Works

  1. Drop PDFs into Claude/Statements/ (already set up)
  2. Run the PowerShell script — it extracts text from each PDF into a matching .txt file alongside it
  3. Claude can read the .txt files directly via MCP — no uploading needed

The script is a one-time run each time new statements arrive. It skips PDFs that already have a .txt — so it’s safe to run repeatedly.

Step 1 – Install poppler

pdftotext is part of the poppler-utils library. Install via winget:

winget install oschwartz10612.poppler

Restart your terminal after so the PATH updates. Verify it worked:

pdftotext -v

Step 2 – Copy the Script to C:\Scripts\

The script is already in the vault at Claude/Convert-PDFToText.ps1. Copy it to where your other scripts live:

Copy-Item "C:\Users\Rick\Coytis\Obsidian\Rick\Claude\Convert-PDFToText.ps1" "C:\Scripts\"

Step 3 – Run It

# Default — targets Claude\Statements\ automatically:
C:\Scripts\Convert-PDFToText.ps1
 
# Or point at a different folder:
C:\Scripts\Convert-PDFToText.ps1 -FolderPath "C:\path\to\folder"
 
# Force re-extract (overwrites existing .txt files):
C:\Scripts\Convert-PDFToText.ps1 -Force

The script will output a summary of what was converted, skipped, or failed.

Future Workflow (Once Set Up)

  1. Download statements from ING
  2. Drop PDFs into Claude/Statements/
  3. Run C:\Scripts\Convert-PDFToText.ps1
  4. Open a new chat and say something like “new statements in the folder, can you do a rundown”
  5. Claude reads the .txt files via MCP and produces the analysis + saves a note to Research/

Files

FileLocation
ScriptC:\Scripts\Convert-PDFToText.ps1
Script source (vault copy)Claude/Convert-PDFToText.ps1
Statements drop folderClaude/Statements/
Example output noteResearch/Bonk Money.md

Troubleshooting

pdftotext not found after install Restart your terminal. If still missing, check that poppler’s bin folder was added to your PATH — may need to add it manually in System Environment Variables.

Extracted text looks garbled Some PDFs use non-standard font encoding. If a .txt comes out as garbage, the PDF may need to be uploaded directly to chat instead (Claude can read them visually that way).

Script won’t run (execution policy)

Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned

Sources

Graph View