The header data of a bank statement
Every statement carries the same details at the top, just arranged differently: the institution, the account holder, the IBAN, a from-to period and a statement number, at German savings banks often a sheet number as well. The statement number is the most interesting item, because it is issued sequentially per account and calendar year. That makes it the only piece of information from which a gap in your filing can be spotted: if No. 46 is followed directly by No. 48, a statement is missing. At the foot stand opening and closing balance, irrelevant for naming but useful when checking an annual series.
Why the name ends on a month rather than a day
A bank statement covers a period, not a cut-off date. That is why the target name reads 2024-03 and not 2024-03-31: the statement belongs to March regardless of whether the bank produced it on the 29th or on 2 April. Sparkasse-Essen instead of Sparkasse is deliberate too, because Sparkasse alone identifies nothing in Germany; Filery takes the institution name as it appears in the statement. Nr-47 is the statement number. Together this produces a file that sorts itself into the right place in the folder and whose completeness can be read off the number series.
Telling several accounts at several banks apart
As soon as business and private accounts sit side by side, the institution name is no longer enough: two accounts at the same bank produce identical names. The usual remedy is an extra field with an account marker — the last four IBAN digits or a label such as business or private. Either can be fixed in the naming pattern when only one account lives in a folder. What is not advisable is the full IBAN in the filename: it carries the account details into every backup, cloud folder and mail attachment.
Daily statements, quarterly bundles and missing numbers
Not every bank issues one statement per month. Some provide a PDF per booking day; then the statement number decides the order and the date field must be set to the exact day. Some direct banks omit the statement number entirely — in that case the period carries the distinction alone, which is enough for chronological filing. The most awkward case is the annual bundle: one PDF containing all twelve statements. Filery renames files, not pages, and would give the whole bundle the period of the first statement in it. Such combined PDFs are better split beforehand.
What accounting and your tax advisor get out of it
Bank statements are records subject to retention requirements, and in a tax audit the complete series is asked for, not a folder of files called statement(7).pdf. A name made of period, institution and statement number answers both questions at once: which period is present and whether anything is missing. Handing records to your firm once a year then saves the follow-up questions about which file is what. The naming pattern is set up once and then applies to every month in which the new statements are downloaded. The effort per month is minimal.
How the statements are processed
Filery reads the PDF on your device and transmits the content encrypted for AI analysis. The recognised metadata comes back — institution, period, statement number — the renaming happens on the device again, and the statements themselves are not stored permanently. Because bank statements are among the more sensitive records, the Custom plan at 5 euros a month is particularly obvious here: the analysis then runs through your own API keys and your own contract with the AI provider. You review every suggestion in the preview before a file changes its name, and the history keeps the previous one.
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