Scanned PDFs

The best way to use Ruffle Report is with official bank statements downloaded from a bank’s online banking platform.

However, we understand that that is not always possible. You don’t always have access to the bank accounts in question, and sometimes you’re at the mercy of the other side when it comes to the manner in which documents are disclosed. Banks sometimes respond to subpoenas with low quality printouts, and court staff sometimes relay subpoenaed documents by way of low quality scans. In short, there are many ways you can end up with bank statements in a format that is less than ideal.

For that reason, Ruffle Report supports scanned PDFs — for an additional charge — in situations where official bank statements are not available.

The extra charge is $3.99 per page, and involves human review to ensure that the document is being processed correctly.

Benefits of Ruffle Report scanned PDFs

• Include bank statements that would otherwise be ignored — get the complete picture from your Ruffle Report.
• Download as Excel — download a fully-searchable Excel file containing all the transactions from the scanned PDFs (as well as all the transactions from any other PDFs you have uploaded).
• Don’t reward bad behaviour — it is unfortunately not uncommon for family law litigants to intentionally provide their financial disclosure in hard-to-read formats, in an attempt to deter their former partner from conducting a thorough review. Reclaim control by converting their low-quality disclosure into a Ruffle Report and fully searchable Excel spreadsheet.
• Safe and secure — all manual processing of bank statement data is performed by employees or vetted contractors here in Australia, with processes in place to ensure that your data is only kept for as long as it is required.

Downsides of Ruffle Report scanned PDFs

We’re up-front and honest at Ruffle Report, and it’s only right to point out some of the drawbacks of Ruffle Report’s support for scanned PDFs.

• Extra cost — the additional cost of $3.99 per page is unfortunate, but unavoidable given the costs we incur in converting the scanned document to text (a process known as “optical character recognition” or OCR) and then converting that text into tabular transaction data.
• Extra time — because the process involves manual human review, it can take longer to process scanned PDFs. That said, we aim to turn things around within two business days.

For these reasons, we recommend you upload official bank statements wherever possible, as these do not attract any additional fee, and can usually be processed within minutes.

Document quality

Simply put, some scans are better than others. If you’ve been given a document that is barely legible to you, it’s going to be hard for a computer to perform the OCR process with 100% accuracy.

While we do perform a manual review of the OCR process, and can often pick up on obvious errors, we cannot review every single word of every single page, and so it is possible that some errors may sneak through. As such, you are advised to refer back to the original source documents if you encounter something that seems overly unusual.

Better scans will yield better results, but even poor-quality scans can be processed with a surprisingly high degree of accuracy. We just can’t guarantee 100%.

How can you tell whether a document is high quality or low quality?

The simplest way is to open the PDF and zoom in on some text.

Poor quality:

Medium quality:

Good quality: