BAI2 to Excel Converter

A BAI2 file looks like a spreadsheet at first glance — it is comma separated, after all — so the obvious move is to rename it .csv and open it. That produces a mess, because BAI2 is not a table. It is a record format: every line starts with a two digit record code that changes the meaning of every field after it. Excel has no idea that 16 means "transaction detail" and 03 means "here is a new account", so it stacks unrelated data into the same columns.

Two more details break naive imports. Amounts are stored in cents with no decimal point, so a $100,000.00 wire appears as 10000000. And whether a line is money in or money out is not a separate field at all — it is encoded in the type code, where 100–399 means credit and 400–699 means debit. This converter handles all three problems.

• 01 — File header: sender, receiver, creation date
• 02 — Group header: as-of date and currency
• 03 — Account identifier, plus opening/closing ledger and available balances
• 16 — Transaction detail: type code, amount, bank reference, customer reference, text
• 88 — Continuation: appended to the previous record so long descriptions stay intact
• 49 / 98 / 99 — Account, group and file trailers

A raw BAI2 transaction record looks like this:

After conversion it becomes a single row: type 195 — Incoming Money Transfer, direction CREDIT, amount 100000.00, bank reference WIRE55021, customer reference PO-2231, with the continuation text merged into the description.