Parsing credit card statement PDFs: handling signs, detail lines and balance tie-outs

Extracting transactions from credit card statement PDFs is often harder in deciding what each row means than in locating the table. A key pitfall is that some issuers print payments without minus signs, so a parser trusting printed signs can misread a payment as a purchase and double the error. The recommended approach classifies each line by its section heading and kind before assigning a sign from the magnitude. Foreign-currency detail lines and year-to-date summaries must be excluded from the transaction output. Finally, the rows should be checked against the statement's printed previous and new balances, using exact decimal arithmetic, to confirm they reconcile to the cent.