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CSV2QIF Convert is a single step financial data translator to convert QIF Format files from CSV files.
Use CSV2QIF Convert to import transaction data into Quicken® software or other financial applications 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 verify your desired date formats with the Settings button. If you are planning to import the .qif file into Quicken you must additionally set the Quicken account name, also under Settings.
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 qif button-to do one-step conversion of other files directly to .qif 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 check box for Switch signs of amounts on output and the amounts will be correctly output to your .qif file.
Select Create qif at the bottom of the Preview Screen to finish the conversion and create your .qif file. Run subsequent conversions of CSV statements from the same bank with the Convert button, select a file and then Convert to qif.
See below for the correct procedure to read a QIF format file into Quicken.
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 csv2qif.lic from the product confirmation e-mail to the same folder where you installed CSV2QIF Convert - i.e. C:\Program Files (x86)\MoneyThumb\csv2qif 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 actually running CSV2QIF Convert:
This can be downloaded from a bank or brokerage web site, created by the QIF2CSV counterpart to this program, or be manually created in Excel and saved as a CSV (Comma Delimited) file in Excel. See Appendix A for guidelines to create a file from scratch.
If you downloaded a CSV file from a bank or other web site, then either:
If you are editing or creating a CSV file, make the first line of the file be an Account Header of the form:
!Type:accounttype;accountname where accounttype is Bank or CCard or Invst.
See Appendix A for more details
If you ran QIF2CSV the account name header has already been created.
The account name has to be an exact match for Quicken to recognize it, but the name is not case sensitive.
On Windows or Mac OS X, double click the CSV2QIF Convert icon on your desktop.
You may also run CSV2QIF Convert from the Windows Start Menu, or run CSV2QIF.exe on Windows or CSV2QIF 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 about the type of conversion. The Settings Dialog contains the same information in a single dialog. 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 .qif file - Bank, Credit Card, Cash, or Investment. All QIF format files must have an account type. It may be specified in these settings, or by special syntax at the beginning of the .csv file (see Appendix A for the formats).
Note that for the Quicken Starter edition, you should always use an account type of Cash.
If you are going to be importing into Quicken, you will need to set the Quicken account type and account name. Also see #2 above. For the Quicken Account Name enter the name of the account in Quicken that you want to import into. It must match exactly, although the matching is not case sensitive. If the account name is not set correctly in the .qif file, then Quicken will refuse to read the .qif file.
CSV2QIF Convert can read and write dates either in US format (month-day-year) or European format (day-month-year). Use the Settings dialog to select the date format for reading and writing. The read choice reflects what is used in your input CSV file, and the write choice is what your financial application such as Quicken expects in the .qif file. In most cases the read and write settings will be the same, but it is possible to read dates in one format and write them in the other. Quicken always expects US format dates.
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. CSV2QIF 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
There are two ways to identify the CSV file to convert:
or
CSV2QIF 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 CSV2QIF 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 first 20 lines of your CSV file. First select the correct account type at the top of the window. 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 CSV2QIF 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 check box for Switch signs of amounts should be selected. This will ensure that debits and credits are correctly labeled in the .qif file, and imported correctly into your application. The check box 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.
You can also specify which columns contain amounts that are to be split into categories. There are predefined column names for the categories Gross Amount, Transaction Fee, and Refund Amount. For these columns, if there is an amount present, it will generate a split amount for the transaction. 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>. See the section below on Categories and Splits.
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. CSV2QIF Convert will run, giving some statistics on how many lines were processed and create a .qif file with the same name. If a .qif 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 qif at the bottom of the dialog
CSV2QIF Convert will run, giving some statistics on how many lines were processed and create a .qif file with the same name. If a .qif 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, it is often desirable to have this information as different categories in a single transaction. For example the gross amount of the sale and the transaction fee would be splits within single transaction, each having a different Quicken category.
Presets in CSV2QIF Convert make this conversion very simple.
1. Select Settings and read in the Preset file for the payment system processor with Load Preset. CSV2QIF Convert is shipped with a number of standard preset files for common payment systems and credit cards.
2. You will also likely want to select the check box for Separate Splits so that transactions are created as split transactions.
3. Select Convert and run the conversion with Convert to qif. You will automatically have the correct columns mapped, and create a .qif 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.
To read the .qif file into Quicken, open Quicken, select File, then from the pull-down menu select File Import, and then QIF File... This will bring up a dialog window.
In the box for Location of QIF file, browse to get the name of the file generated by CSV2QIF Convert. In the line for Quicken Account to import into, select the pull-down and select <All Accounts> or <All Account> (depending on your version of Quicken). Selecting an individual bank or credit card account will not work. With that selection, you can then ignore the warning about not being able to import checking, savings, or credit cards etc. The QIF Format files created by CSV2QIF Convert contain the account name in a format that Quicken does read. Select the appropriate check boxes for the type of .qif file being read. To read transactions for a single account the only box selected should be Transactions.
After importing the .qif file, you will likely need to go to the account register and accept the downloaded transactions into the account. In some releases of Quicken you will need to edit the Quicken Preferences for Downloaded Transactions to uncheck the option for Automatically add to banking registers in order for Quicken to show the downloaded transactions to accept.
For the Quicken Starter edition, the <All Accounts> selection is not available. You should always have an account type of Cash, and select the an existing Cash account as the account to import into. You can get all your transactions into a bank or credit card by creating a Category column and having each value in that column be your bank or credit name in square brackets - i.e. [Credit Card Account].
CSV2QIF Convert will process categories so that they are input by Quicken. Create a column with a header of Category, and each transaction with an entry in that column will have it assigned as a category. If the category does not exist, you will be prompted to add categories when reading the .qif file into Quicken. CSV2QIF Convert will also process categories that are transfers - i.e. use a category of [My Account] to transfer an amount to a Quicken account called My Account.
CSV2QIF Convert will also handle Quicken generated split transactions in a CSV file that is created by QIF2CSV Convert. Such a file can also be created in Excel, with up to 50 splits in a transaction. Splits are to the right of the last labeled column, with each split taking up 3 cells. These are, in order, the category, the amount, and the memo for the split. See the Appendix for more details.
Another common occurrence in CSV files that come from other programs or financial institutions is that all the amounts in a particular column should be considered a split. For example, CSV files generated by PayPal have columns for Gross, Fee, and Net. It's very useful to have such a transaction automatically split when its imported into Quicken so that the Gross goes to income, and the Fees go to expenses. To do this with CSV2QIF Convert, change any columns that should be split to "Split<QuickenCategory>". For example, to split PayPal transactions on input, you would change the column header from Gross to Split<Sales (Business)> and from Fee to Split<Discounts (Business)>, or whatever other categories you would like to use in Quicken. When using Preview Mode, select Split<> as the column type, and then type the column number into the dialog that comes up.
When importing QIF Format files, Quicken uses the security name, not the stock symbol to match up with existing securities in Quicken. Since many brokerages create CSV transaction files using stock symbols, this can make the import of stock transactions tedious since you have to manually match them up on import. CSV2QIF Convert can handle this either by using an additional column in the transaction list that contains the stock name, or by using a Security List CSV file and utilizing the Security List to substitute the stock symbol by the security name. As a last resort, CSV2QIF Convert will attempt to extract a security name from the transaction description or comment field, but this is unreliable and can lead to confusing security names.
You can create a Security List by exporting a Security List QIF Format file from Quicken and processing it with QIF2CVS, 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 CSV2QIF Convert and first process the security list CSV file, and then process the investment transactions CSV file, without exiting CSV2QIF Convert. When done in this sequence CSV2QIF 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 |
Symbol |
Apple Inc. |
AAPL |
Google Inc |
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
When running in Express Mode, CSV2QIF Convert will process multiple accounts or lists from a single CSV file. Each account or list should be separated by a blank row in the spreadsheet or CSV file. If there are multiple accounts in a single .qif file, then the account name must be specified for each account, and the first line of each account should have the !Type format described in Appendix A. To read transactions for multiple accounts, the box in the QIF import dialog labeled Special Handling for Transfers should be checked. Other boxes should be selected depending on the data wanted to be input.
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.
If there are transactions showing in the account list, but not at the bottom of the account register, you may need to modify your Quicken preferences. Under the preferences for Downloaded transactions uncheck the top check-box on the right hand side for Automatically add to banking registers.
Also review the log in the CSV2QIF 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 CSV2QIF 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 CSV2QIF 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 you are importing the .qif 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.
After CSV2QIF 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, this is a complete description of the conventions used by CSV2QIF Convert.
By way of example, a simple bank account might look like this:
!Type:Bank;My bank account |
||||||
Date |
Number |
Payee |
Cleared |
Amount |
Category |
Memo |
5/1/2016 |
Opening Balance |
X |
0 |
[My bank account] |
||
5/2/2016 |
Deposit |
* |
100 |
Gifts |
From David |
|
5/10/2016 |
ATM |
ATM Withdrawal |
* |
50 |
Cash |
|
5/18/2016 |
INT |
Interest Paid This Period |
* |
0.01 |
_IntInc |
As an alternative to Settings dialog, the first line for account can also specify the type of account and the account name in the format:
!Type:accounttype;accountname
where accountname is the account name in quicken, and accounttype is one of the following:
If the first line does not have this type of information, then CSV2QIF Convert will look at the column headers to determine the account type, and determine the account name from the user specified name, or otherwise the CSV file name.
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 CSV2QIF 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 CSV2QIF 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.
Split transactions will be automatically created with a column header of
Split<Category>
For example the following can be used to define a paycheck made up of a gross amount with taxes taken out.
Date |
Number |
Payee |
Amount |
Split<Gross> |
Split<Tax> |
4/30/2016 |
DEP |
Acme Inc. |
4100.00 |
5000.00 |
-900.00 |
This would create a transaction with a net value of $4100, containing two splits. Note that the net amount is calculated and does not need to be in the csv file.
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. It is also possible to add a Tag to a transaction in Quicken with a column header syntax of: Split<Category/Tag>.
Alternatively, splits for any individual transaction will be read in columns to the right of the last column as
Note that this is the format created by QIF2CSV Convert. With this method, split columns do not require a header, CSV2QIF Convert will automatically check every transaction for possible splits.
For example, either of the following can be used to define a paycheck with a gross salary and taxes taken out; the split headers are optional.
Date |
Number |
Payee |
Amount |
Category |
Memo |
Split1C |
Split1M |
Split1 |
Split2C |
Split2M |
Split2 |
4/2/2016 |
DEP |
Acme |
4100.00 |
Salary |
Salary:Gross |
Memo_1 |
5000.00 |
Salary:Taxes |
Memo_2 |
-900.00 |
Date |
Number |
Payee |
Amount |
Category |
Memo |
||||||
4/2/2016 |
DEP |
Acme |
4100.00 |
Salary |
Salary:Gross |
Memo_1 |
5000.00 |
Salary:Taxes |
Memo_2 |
-900.00 |
Up to 50 splits may be present for a transaction. If you have columns that you do not want to be considered as possible splits, use a header of 'Ignore' and they will be ignored.
quantity, price
total
quantity
total
In addition, there are many different ways that brokerages create CSV files, and sometimes required information is found the memo column. CSV2QIF 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.
Mint CSV files need to be edited in a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel in order to be processed by csv2qif Convert. Use the following steps to get accurate data conversion into Quicken
!Type:Bank;My Checking | |||||||
Date | Payee | Memo | Amount | Type | Category Name | Account Name | Notes |
For credit card accounts the first line would use CCard, such as:
!Type:CCard;My Visa | |||||||
Date | Payee | Memo | Amount | Type | Category Name | Account Name | Notes |
Mint generated CSV files will have those transactions, but the account names in the category column often do not match the actual account name being transfered to/from. And the account name needs to be enclosed in square brackets.
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