Four bank file formats, and which software takes which

What is inside an OFX file

Open Financial Exchange is a tagged text format, closer to HTML than to a spreadsheet. Each transaction is a block, and two fields decide whether an import goes right.

DTPOSTED is the date, written year first: 20240131 for the 31st of January 2024. There is no ambiguity in that, ever, which is the biggest advantage OFX has over any CSV. A date can optionally carry a time and a timezone offset, which some banks add and stricter parsers occasionally trip over.

FITID is the financial institution's transaction ID, meant to be unique within the file, and importing software uses it to recognise a transaction it has already taken in. Intuit's troubleshooting page for Web Connect files describes the mechanism plainly: QuickBooks stores the ID numbers of transactions it has added, and will not let you import the same ID more than once.

Useful until it is not. It is also why an import can silently bring in nothing at all, which has its own guide here.

What QFX and QBO add on top

Both add Intuit-specific tags, the important one being INTU.BID. It is a numeric Intuit Business ID: a key into Intuit's own directory of financial institutions registered for Web Connect. The file says, in effect, these transactions came from institution number such-and-such.

Quicken checks for it. QuickBooks Desktop checks for it. That check is the difference between a file that imports and a plain OFX that does not, and it is why Quicken's own Windows support page lists OFX among the formats it cannot import, next to Excel and PDF.

So a converter cannot honestly produce a QFX or a QBO without a registration. There is no algorithm for the value. You either have an ID Intuit issued to a real institution, or you put in one that belongs to someone else. The second is worse than failing, because if the number matches a real bank in Intuit's directory the import succeeds and your file now claims to have come from a bank you have never used.

This site makes plain OFX for that reason. Not as a limitation to be worked around later. It is the only version of this that is truthful.

QIF is a different generation

QIF is Quicken Interchange Format, and it predates OFX. It is a flat text file, one line per field, with single-letter codes: D for date, T for amount, P for payee, M for memo.

Two consequences follow from its age. There is no transaction ID, so nothing can tell a repeat import from a new one, and importing the same QIF twice gives you everything twice. And the date line has no fixed convention, so whether 03/04 means the third of April or the fourth of March depends on what wrote the file and what is reading it.

It survives because it is simple and widely read. Quicken still imports it, with restrictions its own documentation contradicts itself on, and Xero accepts it. A reasonable format to receive, a poor one to trust unchecked.

Which software takes which

Checked against each vendor's own documentation on 12 September 2026. Import support moves between versions, countries and product tiers, so treat this as where to look rather than a promise.

• Quicken Classic takes QFX, QIF and CSV in a fixed column layout. Its Windows support page states it cannot import OFX.
• QuickBooks Desktop takes QBO Web Connect files for bank transactions. Intuit's page notes that importing a Web Connect file requires you to be signed in to your Intuit Account inside QuickBooks Desktop. CSV is not a native route for bank transactions there.
• QuickBooks Online is the broadest of the Intuit products. Its own bank file help lists "Quicken (.qfx), QuickBooks Online (.qbo), Comma-Separated Values (.csv), and Microsoft Money (.ofx)", so a plain OFX is accepted. Limits to plan around: 350 KB or less, and up to 1,000 lines per upload.
• GnuCash imports OFX and QFX through one menu item, File, Import, Import OFX/QFX transactions, and its documentation says that as far as GnuCash is concerned the two are identical. It needs libofx present, which is why the menu item is sometimes missing on Linux until you install it.
• Xero accepts CSV, and has its own help articles for QIF and for OFX style bank files. Its CSV import wants either three columns or four, and it is fussy about dates.
• YNAB prefers CSV with a Date, Payee, Memo, Outflow, Inflow header, and also reads OFX, QFX and QIF.
• Moneydance, Banktivity, HomeBank, KMyMoney and most non-Intuit finance software read plain OFX. This is the group the format was designed for.

Two naming collisions that waste an hour each

First: QBO is both a file extension and a product nickname. A .qbo file is a Web Connect bank file for QuickBooks Desktop. QBO as people say it out loud usually means QuickBooks Online, which mostly does not want .qbo files. A forum answer about "importing into QBO" can mean either.

Second: QuickBooks Online lists OFX support under the label "Microsoft Money (.ofx)". Microsoft Money has not been sold since 2009. Scan that list for the word OFX, skip the old product name, and you will conclude it is unsupported when it is not.

And a third: QXF is not QFX. QXF moves a whole Quicken data file between installations.

Which one should you ask your bank for

In order of how little trouble they cause:

1. The native Intuit file for your software, if your bank offers it. A QBO if you are in QuickBooks Desktop, a QFX if you are in Quicken. It carries the institution ID, so nothing has to be converted.
2. OFX, if your software is anything other than Quicken or QuickBooks Desktop. Unambiguous dates, transaction IDs, no guessing.
3. CSV, which every bank has and which always needs work. The date order is the thing that will bite you.
4. QIF, if it is all there is. Check the dates by hand on import, and do not import it twice.
5. PDF, which is not a data format at all. It is printed text that looks like a table, and getting data out of it is a separate job.

Converting between them

Going from a less structured format to a more structured one is mechanical. CSV to OFX is arithmetic plus two decisions: which way round the dates are, and which character is the decimal point. Both can be settled from evidence in the file if you look for a row that can only be read one way, and both are silently wrong if you guess.

Going from OFX to QFX or QBO is not a conversion. It is adding a claim about which bank the file came from, and either you hold that registration or you are making it up.

On this site the converter reads a bank CSV, a QIF or an OFX and writes a clean OFX: the right file for GnuCash, QuickBooks Online, Xero, YNAB and most non-Intuit software, and the wrong file for Quicken Classic and QuickBooks Desktop. That is the whole boundary, stated once.

Questions, answered.