UK lenders combine credit reference data with three to six months of bank statements to stress-test affordability. They total committed spend — rent or mortgage, loans, credit cards, childcare, bills — add the proposed mortgage payment at a stressed rate, and require the result to fit verified income with room to spare. Converted to Excel, the same arithmetic takes minutes: monthly income, recurring obligations by category, and an expense-to-income ratio on the applicant's actual file.
Committed spend hides in plain sight. Direct debits for cars, phones, and subscriptions, standing orders to savings that stop the month a mortgage starts, and buy-now-pay-later instalments that never appear on a credit file all surface in categorized transactions. Applicants who total these lines before applying can clear or consolidate the small ones that push ratios over lender limits.
Conduct flags end more applications than arithmetic. Gambling transactions, returned direct debits, heavy overdraft reliance, and payday-loan deposits each trigger manual review at most high-street lenders. Filtering the converted rows for those descriptors shows exactly which months carry the markers, so a three-month clean run can be planned before the decision in principle.
Preview the underwriter's view: convert recent statements to Excel with the Bank Statement Converter and build the affordability table a broker will ask for.