“Amounts in brackets imported as positive”
Short answer
Accounting notation writes negatives as (1,234.56), and an importer that strips punctuation before reading the number turns it into a positive 1234.56 — a valid figure meaning the opposite. StatementFix reports bracketed amounts rather than rewriting them; convert them to a leading minus sign, reverse any import already made, and check one known withdrawal afterwards.
Accounting notation writes negatives in brackets. An importer that strips punctuation before reading the number turns every one of them positive — and because the resulting value is a valid number, nothing is reported. This is the quietest way a statement import can put wrong money in your books.
Symptoms
Every withdrawal imported as a deposit The balance moves the wrong way by exactly twice the expected amount The file shows brackets around amounts when opened
What actually causes it
Brackets stripped rather than interpreted
Naive cleaning removes anything that is not a digit, a sign or a decimal point. "(1,234.56)" becomes "1234.56", which passes every validity check while meaning the opposite of what the bank wrote.
A convention inherited from accounting exports
Files produced by accounting software rather than by a bank use this notation as standard, so it appears most often exactly when you are moving data between systems.
Mixed notation in one file
Some exports use brackets for some rows and a minus sign for others, so part of the file imports correctly and the rest inverts — which hides the pattern.
How to fix it
- Drop the file into the fixer below. Bracketed amounts are reported explicitly rather than quietly rewritten.
- Reverse the import before correcting anything; editing entries one by one is slower and the next import repeats the error.
- Convert brackets to a leading minus sign in a spreadsheet, then re-check the file before importing.
- Verify one known withdrawal after import to confirm the direction is right before trusting the rest.
Skip the manual edit — fix it automatically
The fixer refuses to normalise a bracketed amount on its own — turning (1,234.56) into a positive silently is exactly the failure this rule exists to prevent. Free, no signup, no upload.
Open the fixer