RBC's own help pages confirm the shape of the problem: eStatements are kept in Online Banking for up to seven years, and every one of them is a PDF. So while RBC does let you download recent activity as a file, anything from the back half of that seven-year archive arrives as a document, not a spreadsheet. An RBC personal chequing eStatement prints five columns — Date, Description, Withdrawals, Deposits and Balance, each money column suffixed with a currency marker — and it is sparse in two directions at once: the date is printed once per day rather than once per transaction, and so is the balance. Rows in the middle of a busy day carry neither. That double gap is exactly what naive extractors lose.
- Day-grouped dates are carried forward, so the second and third transactions on a date keep that date instead of coming out blank.
- Withdrawals and deposits stay in separate Debit and Credit columns, so no amount silently changes direction.
- End-of-day balances are read as end-of-day, not carried down the page into a balance chain that looks continuous and is wrong.
- The seven-year eStatement archive is fully usable — an RBC PDF from six years ago converts the same way as last month's.