Strategic Stewardship · Tax estimate · Part one
Every account that business money touched, one file each. About half an hour the first time, ten minutes the next. Then the sorting is the AI agent's job, not yours.
Include accounts where business and personal money mix; the AI agent sorts by what each purchase was for, not by which card paid. Why co-mingling can be an issue and how to stop it.
Name each file so you can tell them apart later: Chase checking 2026.csv, Amex 2026.csv, Venmo March 2026.csv. Put them all in one folder.
Chase has the download. It is just hard to find.
Chase1234_Activity_20260101_20261027.CSV.Repeat for every Chase account and every Chase card. Chase will usually give you up to about two years in one file, which is more than enough.
Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citi, US Bank, Capital One, credit unions and the rest all follow the same shape. The words change; the route does not.
If there is no CSV anywhere: download the monthly PDF statements instead. The steps are in the next section.
Some banks and credit unions only give you the monthly statement as a PDF. That works. You need every month of the year, twelve files per account.
Credit union checking March 2026.pdf, and put them all in one folder.Then run them through The Scrubber. It reads the text of each PDF, removes the account numbers and your details, and gives you back a text file of the statement plus a CSV of the transaction rows, keeping the printed totals so the AI agent can check that no rows were missed.
Scanned statements do not work. If the PDF is a scan or a photo of paper, there is no text inside it to read. Ask the bank for the electronic statement, or use the print-to-PDF trick further down on the transaction page itself.
Treat every card like an account of its own, including cards you also use personally. The AI agent separates the personal charges; you do not have to.
American Express says you can download recent activity and the past six billing statements this way, with CSV as one of the formats. If you need further back, download the older monthly statements as PDFs from the same page.
Same route as other banks: sign in on the website, open the card, find Download or Export above the transactions, choose CSV, set the date range. If the card only offers monthly PDF statements, download all of them.
Venmo gives you one month per file, so a full year is twelve downloads. It takes about five minutes.
Why this matters: your bank only shows "Venmo" as one lump when money moves in or out. The Venmo files show who paid you and who you paid.
PayPal also has monthly statements at paypal.com/reports/accountStatements (click Request next to the month, then Download when it is ready), but the Activity report is the one you want because it has every transaction on one sheet.
The phone app shows your activity but does not export it. Use the website.
If you hold more than one currency, download one statement per currency. Check this route against your own account; Wise moves its menus around.
Nothing to download. Apple Pay and Google Pay are not accounts; every payment made through them shows up on the card or bank account behind it, which you have already downloaded. Downloading them separately would count everything twice.
Two exceptions:
Some purchase histories have no download button at all: the App Store and iTunes purchase history, some subscription dashboards, some marketplaces. You do not need screenshots. Save the page as a PDF.
App Store purchases 2026.pdf.The whole loaded page becomes one file, however long it is. The AI agent reads it like a statement.
For Apple specifically, there is also an official export: at privacy.apple.com, sign in, choose "Request a copy of your data," tick "App Store, iTunes Store, and Apple Books purchase history," and Apple emails a file within a few days. The print-to-PDF route is faster.
Statements carry your account numbers, your name and your address. None of that needs to leave your computer, and none of it goes on our site. The Scrubber is a small file you download and run on your own computer, with your internet off if you like. It removes the identifying numbers and your personal details, keeps the last four digits so you can still tell accounts apart, and gives you back scrubbed copies to attach.
Then go back to the tax estimate page, attach the scrubbed files and the instructions to your own AI agent, and let it do the sorting. The spreadsheet it gives you back is what you drop into the calculator on that page.