How to Check a Spreadsheet Against PDF Invoices

Published 13 November 2026. Where other products are mentioned we describe the kind of product and its pricing model, not figures, which change.

You have a spreadsheet of invoices — a supplier statement, a cost report, an export from an accounts system — and a folder of the PDF invoices it is supposed to describe. Before you rely on the spreadsheet, you want to know that the two agree. The reliable way is to turn the PDFs into a second table and match the two on invoice number, not to read them side by side.

Quick answer

Get the PDFs into rows (supplier, invoice number, date, net, VAT, total), then use XLOOKUP or VLOOKUP keyed on the invoice number to pull each PDF total next to the spreadsheet total, and flag any row where the difference is not zero. Then run the lookup the other way round to find invoices that are in one place and not the other.

Method 1: spot check a sample

Open ten invoices at random and compare each to its row. It is quick and it tells you whether the spreadsheet is broadly trustworthy, but it proves nothing about the rows you did not open. Use it when the spreadsheet is low stakes, or as a first look before deciding whether a full check is needed.

Method 2: tick every invoice off by eye

Sort the spreadsheet by invoice number, sort the PDFs by filename, and go down the list with a "checked" column. This works up to a few dozen invoices. Beyond that it is slow and, worse, it is unreliable: people reading two numbers side by side stop seeing the difference between 1,840.00 and 1,480.00 long before they reach the end.

Method 3: match the two tables on invoice number

This is the method that scales. Put the figures from the PDFs into their own sheet, one row per invoice, then let a formula do the comparing.

Sheet "Report": the spreadsheet you were given, with invoice number in column A and total in column B.
Sheet "PDFs": one row per PDF invoice, with invoice number in column A and total in column B.
In Report!C2, pull the PDF total: =XLOOKUP(A2, PDFs!A:A, PDFs!B:B, "missing"). In older Excel use =IFERROR(VLOOKUP(A2, PDFs!A:B, 2, FALSE), "missing").
In Report!D2, show the difference: =IF(C2="missing", "no PDF", B2-C2). Fill both formulas down.
Filter column D for anything that is not 0. Those are the rows to look at.
Repeat from the other side: in PDFs!C2, =XLOOKUP(A2, Report!A:A, Report!B:B, "missing") finds invoices you hold a PDF for that the spreadsheet never mentions.

Two details decide whether this works. Invoice numbers must match exactly, so trim spaces and decide what to do about leading zeros and prefixes ("INV-0042" against "42") before you start. And one supplier’s invoice 1001 is not another supplier’s invoice 1001: if the spreadsheet covers several suppliers, match on supplier and number together by adding a helper column that joins them.

Method 4: check the things a total cannot tell you

Totals agreeing is necessary, not sufficient. Three more checks catch what a total match misses.

Duplicates: count how many times each supplier-and-invoice-number pair appears, with COUNTIFS. Anything above one has been entered or sent twice.
Net, VAT and gross: check that net plus VAT equals the total on every row. A spreadsheet that mixes VAT-inclusive and VAT-exclusive figures in one column will match some invoices and not others.
Dates: an invoice dated outside the period the spreadsheet claims to cover is either in the wrong report or missing from another one.

The slow part is getting the PDFs into rows

Every method above except the spot check needs the PDF figures in a table, and typing them is where the time and the errors go. For text-based PDFs from one supplier, Excel’s Get Data from PDF can sometimes pull the tables out. For a mixed folder — different suppliers, scans, photographed paper — Invoices to Spreadsheets reads the whole batch into one table with supplier, invoice number, date, net, VAT and total, shows each row beside its original so you can confirm it, flags possible duplicates, and exports to Excel or CSV. That export is the "PDFs" sheet in Method 3.

If you only have one invoice to check, the free converter on this site reads a single PDF or photo without an account.

Free invoice tracker template, with the columns this check needs

How do I cross-reference a spreadsheet with PDF invoices?

Put the PDF invoices into their own table with one row per invoice, then use XLOOKUP or VLOOKUP on the invoice number to bring each PDF total next to the spreadsheet total and subtract one from the other. Any row where the difference is not zero, or where the lookup finds nothing, needs checking.

What should I match on?

Invoice number, together with the supplier when more than one supplier is involved. Totals and dates are what you compare once the rows are matched; they are poor keys on their own because two invoices can share a total or a date.

Why do my lookups return "missing" when the invoice is clearly there?

Almost always formatting: a trailing space, a number stored as text on one side and as a number on the other, a leading zero dropped by Excel, or a prefix such as INV- present on one side only. Clean both columns the same way with TRIM and, if needed, convert both to text before matching.

Can Excel read the PDFs for me?

For text-based PDFs, Data > Get Data > From File > From PDF can import tables, which works best when every invoice comes from the same supplier in the same layout. It does not read scans or photos, and mixed layouts need a separate import step each.

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