Bank Statement Download Automation

We built an unattended statement retrieval robot on a self-hosted n8n platform. The banks are reached through their online portals with RPA, not through an API.

Our own RPA engine, native to n8n

Instead of licensing a separate RPA product per robot, we built our own browser automation connectors that run natively inside n8n workers, on the long-term-support version of Playwright. The library has more than 50 custom activities and can automate any browser-based application. The browser behaves like a real user: human-like input, timing and navigation. No RPA licence per robot, no separate robot runtime, and the robots scale with the n8n workers.

Configuration the accountants own

One Excel row per bank account: bank, company profile as named in the portal, company ID, account, authentication method, credential owner, destination path and an on/off switch. Adding an account, a company or a whole new client is a row, not a change request.

2FA, handled two ways

Built so the banks never notice a robot

• Session-aware sequencing. Accounts are grouped by credential, so every company profile inside one bank is handled in a single session. No repeated logins, no lockouts.
• One sub-automation per bank covers navigation, login, company and account selection, and download, assembled from the same activity library.

Filed where the next robot expects it

Statements and balances are downloaded as PDF and Excel, converted where a bank's export requires it, renamed to the firm's convention and uploaded to a dated SharePoint folder structure through the Microsoft Graph API. Credentials sit in an encrypted store.

• Runs automatically on the 5th and 15th of each month, and on demand through an authenticated link.
• Individual accounts can be switched off without touching anything else.

Technology

• Statement collection for 70+ companies across 3 banks runs unattended, twice a month.
• About 25 hours of manual work removed each month, roughly 300 hours a year.
• The closing no longer depends on who is in the office and holds the codes.
• Every file arrives named and filed to one convention. That is what makes the downstream bank reconciliation robot possible: this robot is its input.
• Onboarding a new bank account costs a configuration row instead of developer time.
• A reusable engine. Any further portal or web application the firm uses can be automated from the same 50+ activities.

The risk most teams miss

Bank portals change their layout without notice. A robot without monitoring and a maintenance plan simply stops, and nobody notices until the closing. We build both in from day one.