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CSV2QFX Convert is a single step financial data translator to convert bank, credit card, and brokerage transactions into QFX format suitable for Quicken® software. Use CSV2QFX Convert to import transaction data into Quicken when the data comes from a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel® or Google Docs® or was downloaded from your financial institution in CSV (spreadsheet) format.
To get started first set your Quicken account information and date formats with the Settings button. It is important to select an FID. If your bank or brokerage is not listed, then it is not supported by Quicken, and you need to select the FID of some other bank as a workaround. See more about FID's below.
Then either drag and drop your CSV file into the converter drop zone or select the Convert button to choose a file to convert. This will bring up a standard file chooser to select your CSV download. There are two action buttons, plus the cancel button, at the bottom of the file chooser. Use the Preview button to preview how .csv files will convert, and to assign and verify which column is which before doing the import. Once you have previewed a file, then use the Convert to qfx buttonto do one-step conversion of other files directly to .qfx file format, suitable for input into Quicken.
Whenever opening a file from a different bank or that has a different layout, always first use Preview to verify the column setup. Use the pull-down list at the bottom of each column to select the correct type of information in that column. Be sure to select one Date column, one Payee column, and either one Amount column or both Credits and Debits columns. If you have a balance column, the column selection should be blank (to ignore it). You can also choose which transactions to convert. See more about Preview Mode below.
Verify that credits to the account are positive and debits are negative. If they are switched, then select the checkbox for Switch signs of amounts on output and the amounts will be correctly output to your .qfx file.
Select Create qfx at the bottom of the Preview Screen to finish the conversion and create your .qfx file. Run subsequent conversions of CSV statements from the same bank with the Convert button, select a file and then Convert to qfx.
Import the .qfx file directly into Quicken simply by selecting the Import button. Or read the .qfx file from within Quicken using File, File Import, Web Connect File. Do NOT try to read as a Quicken Transfer File (.qxf) which is something else entirely.
Enter the license by copying the license string (CTRL-C) from the confirmation e-mail and pasting it (CTRL-V) into the converter license dialog. To enter the license string manually from within the program select the License button, and paste (or type) the full license code into the dialog.
On Microsoft Windows, you can copy the license file csv2qfx.lic from the product confirmation e-mail to the same folder where you installed CSV2QFX Convert - i.e. C:\Program Files (x86)\MoneyThumb\csv2qfx Convert.
After you enter your license, your license email will be shown in the program title bar, and in About.
There are two things to do before running CSV2QFX Convert
This can be downloaded from a bank or brokerage web site or be manually created in Excel and saved as a CSV (Comma Delimited) file in Excel. See Appendix A for guidelines on creating a file from scratch.
On Windows or Mac OS X, double click the CSV2QFX Convert icon on your desktop.
You may also run CSV2QFX Convert from the Windows Start Menu, or run CSV2QFX.exe on Windows or CSV2QFX Convert.app on Mac OS X.
Use the Settings button to bring up the Settings Wizard or the full Settings dialog. The Wizard will ask questions that cover the vast majority of conversions. The Settings Dialog also contains a few additional options. You can switch back and forth between the Wizard and the full dialog.
First use the Account Type pull-down menu to select the correct type for the .qfx file - Bank, Credit Card, or Investment. In addition there are four pieces of account information that may be inserted into the QFX file when it is created. The only one of these that is critical is the Quicken FID. This is a four or five digit number that Quicken uses to identify the financial institution. Quicken will validate the FID over the Internet when reading in the QFX file, and it must be correct and valid, or Quicken will abort the file import.
Select "Lookup..." in the dialog and it will bring up a window with all the Quicken Financial Institutions that are listed for that type of account. Type some or all of the name of your financial institution into the search box at the top to search within the list. Scroll down the list to find your bank and select it. The bank URL is also included to help resolve ambiguity if your bank has a name that is similar to other banks.
If your bank or brokerage is not listed, then Quicken will not import QFX files (Web Connect files) that are identified as being from that financial institution. The only workaround is to use an FID from some other bank. You can still name the account to include the name of your financial institution. So long as you as not also doing Quicken Direct Connect downloads into the same account, it will work just fine. There are some Financial Institutions that provide Direct Connect, but do not support Web Connect, and if you use one of these, you will have to create two accounts and move transactions from one to the other.
Just remember that the FID is critical for Quicken, and although CSV2QFX Convert will run without one, it will give a warning, and Quicken will give an error when reading the QFX file.
QFX files are required to have account information. All files require an account number and bank accounts also require a bank routing number. If you don't want to save your accounts numbers for security reasons, then you can skip entering this this information. If you do provide your account number to be inserted into the QFX file, then Quicken uses that number to automatically determine which account to import into. If you are always importing into the same account, then CSV2QFX Convert will save the information from session to session, so you do not have to re-enter it. For PayPal users, your account number is the email address you use to sign into PayPal. Note that CSV2QFX Convert does not access the Internet at all, so any information entered is only saved on your computer, and is not sent over other web or to any other computers.
To determine the account number to use in the QFX file, CSV2QFX Convert will look in the following locations, in order.
!Type:accounttype;accountname^FID|accountnumber
The bank account routing number is required by QFX for bank accounts (but not for credit cards or investment accounts). However, it is not actually used by Quicken, so if you don't specify one, CSV2QFX Convert will insert a default value and Quicken will accept it.
Lastly, the currency needs to be specified. US Dollars are the initial setting, use the drop down to select a different currency.
CSV2QFX Convert can read dates either in US format (month-day-year) or European format (day-month-year). Use the Settings menu to select the date format that is used in your CSV file. If your dates have the month name or abbreviation rather than a number, then this setting is not applicable. Note that there is no need to specify a date format for QFX files.
Normally bank statements will have charges as negative numbers and payments as positive numbers. That is what Quicken expects. Many credit card companies switch things so that charges are positive - showing an increase in your balance - and payments are negative. Use the Settings dialog to select Charges are positive, Payments are negative (Switch signs) if this is the type of data in your CSV file.
CSV files (an acronym for Comma Separated Values) normally use commas to separate the values. However in European and other countries where commas are used to designate the decimal portion (cents) of currency values, CSV file are created with a semi-colon. This option specifies which type of terminator is used in the CSV file being read.
Column names can be preassigned to your conversions. Whenever you use Preview Mode, the column names are saved and automatically assigned to subsequent conversions. See the description of Preview Mode, in the following section. The current column names are displayed in the text box in this section.
You can also read predefined column setting from a CSV format file. CSV2QFX Convert is shipped with a number of presets that facilitate conversion from popular CSV download sites, such as PayPal. To read presets select the Load Preset button, and use the open file dialog to open a csv file with the column names. A preset CSV file is just a single line of text with the column names separated by commas. You can also save the current displayed column names to your own preset file with Save Preset.
When reading transactions from payment systems such as PayPal, the transaction is often composed of a gross amount, a transaction fee, resulting in a net amount. The Separate splits in output transactionsoption specifies whether split transactions such as these create one transaction in the QFX file, or whether each split generates a new transaction in the QFX file. When transactions are split, the Quicken import will create one Quicken transaction that is the received payment amount, and another transaction that is the transaction fee. This enables you to match up payments with invoices, and to track transactions fees in a separate account. If the transaction is not split, such a transaction will be imported as a single transaction with the net amount. See more about specifying split amounts in the description of Preview Mode, in the following section.
>
There are two ways to identify the CSV file to convert:
or
CSV2QFX Convert can be run in two modes - Preview Mode and Express Mode. If you are just getting started, then use Preview Mode. If you have run CSV2QFX Convert previously on a similar file and are sure that the columns are correct, then it's faster to use Express Mode.
Select the Convert button and this will bring up the file chooser dialog. Navigate to the folder containing the .csv file, select the file, and then select Preview at the bottom of the dialog.
This will bring up a preview window that displays the contents of your CSV file. The account type at the top of the window will be fixed to the Quicken account type you chose in the Settings menu. At the bottom of each column is a selector that contains the name of the data in that column. It may have already been set correctly by CSV2QFX Convert based on column headings in the CSV file. If it's not correct, use the pull-down to select the correct type of data. Each type can only be used in one column, so types that have already been used will be grayed out. If you have many columns, you can increase the width of the columns of interest by going to the header row and dragging the column separator to increase the width of the column, and of course drag a corner of the window to enlarge it as well.
Some credit card files also have the the signs of amounts reversed so that credits have a minus sign.In this case the checkbox for Switch signs of amounts should be selected. This will ensure that debits and credits are correctly labeled in the QFX file, and imported correctly into Quicken. The checkbox for Hide unmapped columns will hide all the columns that do not currently have a name assigned. This is very useful for files that come from PayPal or Stripe that have too many columns for them all to be readable.
The only required fields are the Date, and depending on whether the transaction amounts are in one column or two, either Amount or Credits and Debits. If your data has an Amount column that has positive amounts for both credits and debits (i.e. mint.com) then you also need to select a Type column that has the type - credit/debit or CR/DB.
When the Separate Splits option is set under Settings, you can specify which columns contain amounts that are to be split. Additional column names will be displayed for Gross Amount, Transaction Fee, and Refund Amount. For these columns, if there is an amount present, it will generate its own transaction, with a payee of the column name. You can also define your own split names by using the Split<> column name. This will prompt you for the name to used for amounts in this column. You can force the amounts in a column to be either positive or negative amounts by specifying a plus or minus sign before the split name. For example, a transaction fee column can be split out with: Split<-Transaction Fee>
To create a Memo that combines two different columns choose Memo for the the first part of the memo, and Memo Add-on for the second part. The text from the two columns will be combined into a single Memo, with a space between the two text strings.
When the column names are correct select Open at the bottom of the preview window. CSV2QFX Convert will run, giving some statistics on how many lines were processed and create a QFX file with the same name. If a QFX file with that name already exists you will be prompted to overwrite it.
Preview Mode column settings will be automatically remembered, and will apply to subsequent Express Mode conversions. To clear Preview Mode, run a different file in Preview Mode.
Express mode can be used for all conversions, although it is highly recommended that whenever converting a csv file from a new source, you should first use Preview Mode to make sure the column setup is correct. Select the Convert button and this will bring up the file chooser dialog. Navigate to the folder containing your input file, and select Convert to qfx at the bottom of the dialog
CSV2QFX Convert will run, giving some statistics on how many lines were processed and create a QFX file with the same name. If a QFX file with that name already exists you will be prompted to overwrite it.
Payment systems such as PayPal, Square, Stripe create .csv files which contain transactions which contain additional information beyond the net amount of the sale. Most commonly the downloaded .csv file will contain columns with the gross amount of the sale, the transaction fee, and the net amount of the sale. It may also contain a column with the refund amount, if any. When importing this information into Quicken, you may want to have this information as multiple transactions. For example the gross amount of the sale would become one transaction, and the transaction fee would be a second transaction. This allows the two amounts to go to different Quicken accounts, and also allows the the gross amount to be matched up with a customer invoice.
Presets in CSV2QFX Convert make this conversion very simple.
1. Select Settings and read in the Preset file for the payment system processor with Load Preset. CSV2QFX Convert is shipped with a number of standard preset files for common payment systems and credit cards.
2. You may also want to select the checkbox for Separate Splits so that individual transactions are created for each amount.
3. Select Convert and run the conversion with Convert to qfx. You will automatically have the correct columns mapped, and create a .qfx file. If you wish to verify that the column names are correct, you can instead Preview the conversion from the Open File dialog before creating the .qif file.
You can also create your own Preset files if you wish to have different names for the transaction fee, refund, or have a payment system that has additional fields. You can save the column settings that are displayed in the dialog with Save Preset. You can also create preset files with a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel that creates .csv files. The file format is just a single line with the column names, separated by commas.
The easiest way to import the QFX file is simply to select the Import button, which will cause open the file in Quicken. Alternatively you can double-click the QFX file when viewed in Windows Explorer or Max OS X Finder. Another method is to read the QFX file while running Quicken. Select File, then from the pull-down menu select File Import, and then Web Connect File... This will bring up the standard File Open dialog, select the file, and then select Open. The transactions should be read into Quicken. Do NOT try to read the QFX file as a Quicken Transfer File (.QXF) which is something else entirely.
One of the advantages of using QFX file format is that Quicken 'remembers' which transactions it previously read, and will not read the same transaction again. If your CSV file has a transaction ID from your financial institution, then make sure that the column header is correct, and CSV2QFX Convert will use that transaction ID. CSV2QFX Convert will generate transaction Id's if they are not available, but they will not match up with direct downloads from your financial institution.
The list of FID's (Financial Institution ID's) actually comes from your Quicken install, and is the list of banks that have paid to be included as a Quicken supported bank. A bank may be supported for checking accounts, credit cards, investment accounts, or any combination thereof. Similarly a bank may be supported for Direct or WebConnect downloads, or both. And the list is country specific. If your bank chose not to be included, then it will not be in the FID list and Quicken will not import transactions using that bank name. It has nothing to do with CSV2QFX Convert. However, there is a very simple workaround which is to use the FID of some other Financial Institution. You can use pretty much any other FID you want. You should probably choose one that is not a bank you have other accounts at, is a large bank that is unlikely to drop Quicken support, and has a name that is similar to or that you can associate with your bank name.
When you import the QFX file into Quicken, if you receive an error "Quicken is currently unable to verify the financial institution for this download. Please try again later." then the FID is incorrect. Quicken is very picky about this. The financial institution must be currently in good standing with Quicken for Web Connect download, and the account must be of the correct type. Quicken distinguishes between financial institutions that support investment accounts versus those that support bank and credit card transactions.
CSV2QFX Convert will only display those FID's that are listed as being able to import Web Connect files of the account type you selected. If you don't see your bank or brokerage, Quicken will not accept Web Connect files from that financial institution. Quicken tends to have different names for banks and brokerages at the same financial institution and if your financial institution does not support web connect for the type of account you are trying to import, then even though you choose a bank with the same name as your brokerage, you will get the error listed above when trying to import into Quicken. Also, even though a bank may be listed, Quicken may still give this error. That problem seems mostly to occur with small banks, perhaps they did not stay current with Quicken.
If you are running into a brick wall with Quicken FID's, one workaround is to use an FID for some other financial institution other than the one you actually use. However, if you already are downloading from your financial institution, then you would have to have two accounts and copy transactions from one to the other. Therefore, this is practical only if you don't already download directly from that financial institutional, or you import transactions very infrequently.
If Quicken is refusing to link a QFX import to an existing account, then make sure that the account type was set correctly - see the section above on Setting Quicken Account Info. Quicken will only allow you to import credit card QFX files to credit cards accounts, bank account QFX files to bank accounts, and so forth. If the account number was not specified accurately in the Quicken Account Info, then Quicken will generally allow you to do a manual match, but it will also change the account number in Quicken.
The most common reason for this is that you need to accept the transactions into the Quicken account register. In Quicken, go to the account register, select the Downloaded Transactions tab at the bottom of the register, and accept the transactions.
Also review the log in the CSV2QFX Convert log window, and make sure that the transactions were processed. If not, the cause may be a missing header - see next paragraph.
If the CSV2QFX Convert log windows has the error, "No account header found, Using default account header", then it likely means that you are trying to read a CSV file whose first line does not label what each column contains. Some credit card companies create CSV files like this. Either Use Preview Mode to specify what is in each column, or use Notepad or Excel or any text editor to insert a line at the beginning of the CSV file that labels each column. For example, for AMEX the line would be
Date,Number,Amount,Payee,Memo
If the CSV2QFX Convert log windows has the error: "Unknown section header type", then it means that there is no information on what type of account is being processed, or the type is not recognized. Either set the account type in Settings, run in Preview Mode to define the account type , or edit the CSV file to add a line starting with !Type. See Appendix A for a full list of types supported by !Type.
There are missing columns which are needed to process the CSV file. The date might be missing, there might be a credits column without a debits column, or similar types of missing data. Review the column names in Preview Mode, or edit the CSV file to label the columns.
If not all transaction information is being input into Quicken, then verify that the CSV file has headers that correspond to the names in Appendix A. Although CSV2QFX Convert recognizes a wide variety of alternative names, the program or web site that created the CSV file might be using some names for column headers that are not being recognized. Review the column settings in Preview Mode, or edit the CSV file to correct the column names.
If you are importing the QFX file into Quicken or other financial software and information is switched (i.e. the Payee is what you expected for some other field) then the headers in the CSV file may be misunderstood. Either use Preview Mode to correct the column description, or look at the beginning of the conversion log to see what columns are being used for what information, and edit the headers in the CSV file accordingly.
If the amounts are switched (i.e. credit card charges are showing up as positive rather than negative) then use the Settings menu to select Charges are positive, Payments are negative (Switch signs) and rerun the conversion.
If you import multiple accounts from the same bank or credit card company into Quicken and they are going into the same Quicken account, then you need to differentiate the accounts by using a different account number for each account. Use Settings, and Set Quicken Account Info.
Although Quicken does allow the importing of QFX files with investment transactions, many well known brokerages (Fidelity and Charles Schwab to mention two) only support Direct Connect downloads and do not currently support Web Connect, i.e. QFX files. In fact most brokerages that support Direct Connect do not support QFX. The Quicken FID list specifies what types of files each financial institution handles - Direct Connect, or Web Connect (QFX) - and if your brokerage is not listed as being able to import QFX files, then Quicken will not allow you to import transactions from that brokerage. If your brokerage web site does not provide the ability to download a QFX file, then you will probably not be able to import one, even though the file is completely valid. See the paragraph above regarding Errors.
When importing QFX files, Quicken relies on the security name and the security CUSIP. The CUSIP is a 9 digit field that uniquely identifies the security. Finding a CUSIP for a security can be tricky, as there is currently no public Internet search for CUSIP's. Some brokerages do put the CUSIP as a column in the CSV file they create with transactions. CUSIPS for mutual funds and stocks can usually be found at the web site of the mutual fund company or the investor relations page of the company, but it can be hard to find. For well known stocks, you can often find them with a Google search for "symbol cusip". If you cannot find a CUSIP, CSV2QFX Convert will give a warning and create a dummy one, but importing that file could cause problems with future Quicken imports that have the correct CUSIP.
Assuming that one way or another you determined the CUSIP for the securities you want to import, CSV2QFX Convert can read them either by using an additional column in the transaction list that contains the CUSIP, or by using a Security List CSV file and utilizing the Security List to match up the security name, stock symbol and CUSIP.
You can create a Security List by exporting a Security List QIF file from Quicken and processing it with QIF2CVS and adding the CUSIP in a spreadsheet program, or by using Excel or other spreadsheet editor to manually create a Security List and saving it as a CSV file.
To use the Security List, run CSV2QFX Convert and first read the security list CSV file, and then process the investment transactions CSV file, without exiting CSV2QFX Convert. When done in this sequence CSV2QFX Convert will remember the security names and do the substitution automatically. To create a security List in Excel or another spreadsheet program, it should look like this:
!Type:Security |
||
Security Name |
Cusip |
Symbol |
Apple Inc. |
037833100 |
AAPL |
Google Inc |
38259P508 |
GOOG |
You can also insert the security list at the beginning of the transaction CSV file as a separate section and only have to read one file. In this case, just insert one blank row between the security list and the start of the investment account transactions. See Appendix A for more detail
Because a QFX file can only contain transactions from a single financial institution, CSV2QFX Convert will only process the first account found in a CSV file when creating a QFX file. However, CSV2QFX Convert will process a CSV file containing both a security list and an investment account, merging that into a single QFX file.
After CSV2QFX Convert has run, you may wish to save the log information to a file. Select the Save Log button. This will bring up a File Save dialog. Simply specify a file name and select Save.
To clear the log information select the Clear Log button.
If you want to create or edit the CSV file, the following is is a complete description of the conventions used by CSV2QFX Convert.
By way of example, a simple bank account might look like this:
!Type:Bank;My bank account^23456|1111222233334444 |
||||
Date |
Number |
Payee |
Amount |
Memo |
5/1/2011 |
|
Opening Balance |
0 |
|
5/2/2011 |
|
Deposit |
100 |
From David |
5/10/2011 |
ATM |
ATM Withdrawal |
50 |
|
5/18/2011 |
INT |
Interest Paid This Period |
0.01 |
|
The first line for an account must have the type of the account, and may optionally have the account name, FID, and account number. The punctuation is a semi colon after the account type, an up-arrow after the account name, and a vertical bar after the FID.
!Type:accounttype;accountname^FID|accountnumber
The accounttype is one of the following:
The accountname is the name of the account being created, the FID is the Quicken FID, a 4 or 5 digit number that is checked by Quicken, and the accountnumber is the account number that Quicken can use to match accounts.
If the first line does not have this type of information, then CSV2QFX Convert will look at the column headers to determine the account type, and read the rest of the information from the Quicken Account Info dialog.
All data must be in columns, and the columns should have the column name at the top of the column. Normally the column headers are in the second line of the spreadsheet, but CSV2QFX Convert will search until a header row is found. The order of the columns is not important, and only the columns in bold are required.
Many alternate column names are used by various financial institutions, and most of them are recognized by CSV2QFX Convert. If your CSV file does not have column headers, or uses different names, then running under Preview Mode is the easiest way to assign the column names for your CSV file.
The following is the list of 'standard' column names and their meanings for different account types.
When the split transaction option is set, split transactions will be created by using a column header of
Split<Category>
The Category will become the payee name for output transactions after the first one created for this split transaction. The category name can be prefaced by a + or - to ignore the sign of the value in that column, and either add or subtract the value.
Depending on the transaction type some or all of quantity, price, and total may be required for any particular transaction. For example all three are needed for a Buy or Sell, but only quantity is needed to transfer stock in or out of an account.
In addition, there are many different ways that brokerages create CSV files, and sometimes required information is only available in the memo column. CSV2QFX Convert uses the contents of the action, the security, and the memo to determine the complete transaction. If insufficient information is found, then that transaction will be skipped, and the log will describe why.
Saving a CSV file from within Google Docs
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