Need to import your credit card transactions from your bank? Having trouble getting it to work? Looks like your bank didn’t pay Intuit’s extortion fee. (Actually, you didn’t pay — most banks charge you for this header in their QBO export on Intuit’s behalf.)
As it happens, however, your OFX file is very nearly exactly the same as the vaunted QBO file you desperately desire, with one small difference. The information in four different fields indicate to Intuit your bank didn’t pay its bill, so no love for you. Specifically:
ORG (Bank name)
FID (Some ID internal to Intuit)
INTU.BID (Same as FIDNot anymore.)
BANKID (Bank Routing Number)(Probably the above field now.)
While that post was made in 2002, it’s still true today. I verified it with a QBO download from a bank that did pay its Intuit extortion fee. What’s all this mean for you?
If you can get your hands on a QBO file — any QBO file will do just fine — you can change your QFX file into a QBO file and import it into QuickBooks, verified working as of 2009 Pro. Simply find the values above in WordPad in any QBO file and replace them in your QFX file accordingly. Then, rename the file extension to be QBO. Last, import into QuickBooks Pro via Banking -> Online Banking -> Import Web Connect File.
In any event, don’t pay for one of those crap software programs that converts your QIF or OFX into a IIF file. What a futher scam that is! (Especially since both OFX and IFF are published formats, the former an open standard and the latter fully documented by Intuit. You can write your own damn converter easily enough.)
An example from the first portion of an OFX file is below to better illustrate the fields:
<OFX>
<SIGNONMSGSRSV1>
<SONRS>
<STATUS>
<CODE>0
<SEVERITY>INFO
</STATUS>
<DTSERVER>20090618000000[-5:EST]
<LANGUAGE>ENG
<FI>
<ORG>ABC BANK
<FID>12345
</FI>
<INTU.BID>1234
</SONRS>
11 Comments
This works… thanks for the help
The pleasure continues to be all mine!
Re:Importing QFX / OFX into QuickBooks as QBO
Jason, would you please provide a more detailed instruction for the posting above.
I consider myself computer savvy, but I’m not a programmer. I played around with your process, but couldn’t get it to work.
I got the qbo file to trigger QuickBooks’ importing dialogue box, but then it would not recognize the file. It would just open up a previous bank’s downloads.
I’m determined not to spend money on expensive apps. I’d appreciate your help.
I do not have a qbo file so I can see what fields to change please give me detailed instruction on what to change in the ofx file please…
I too have tried, and can’t seem to get it to work.
Anyone that has got it work, any words of advice would be greatly appreciated.
I almost got it working, however I got a QOB from another institution.
I was trying to get credit card statements from one institution as opposed from bank accounts from my other institution.
When I import it, it tries to import it to an account it doesn’t recognize.
Any ideas?
Thanks is advance.
HUH? what do you actually change in wordpad from the original file? what are you supposed to change it to? please detail?
Brilliant! Thank you!
I was very confused by your post, but I finally seemed to figure it out.
For those who are confused, this is what you do:
1. You HAVE to get an actual QBO from another bank. I have multiple checking accounts, so this was easy.
2. Open the QBO and find the , , values. Example: bank 123456 123456
3. Open the QFX file, find the same values from above and replace them with the other banks values.
6. Save as .QBO
7. In quickbooks File > Import > Web Connect. Select the account you want to import to.
Basically, Quickbooks looks for those values to see if the bank “supports” Quickbooks. You’re tricking Quickbooks into thinking that your bank supports the software. The files are exactly the same except for those values.
Hope the moderator can delete my previous messages.
Left the ‘II’ symbol (indicate tab?) after the tag data text in the QIF file, and the conversion from QIF to QBO worked fine just changing the , , and data.
Thanks again to Jason !
Did you find the solution? I changed all the OFX to QBO (right or wrong?) and it get the import window to open (also removed banking info). But when I click the box for “import now” nothing happens. What am I doing wrong?