A Bank2QBO Alternative
PDF to QBO in the Browser, Checked Before Import

What Is Bank2QBO?

What happened to Bank2QBO

For years ProperSoft sold a family of small converters, each named for its job — Bank2QBO, Bank2CSV and others — and many comparisons, including an older version of this page, still describe them that way. Today ProperSoft's Bank2QBO page presents ProperConvert, a single desktop app for Windows and Mac that does all of those jobs.

That changes the comparison in two ways. First, the price: ProperConvert is a subscription — $19.99 a month or $179.99 a year per user and device, with unlimited pages, or $49.98 a month for three seats — not a one-time licence. Second, the feature list grew: it reads PDFs (scanned ones through an OCR option), CSV and Excel, and also existing QBO, QFX and OFX files, and it writes IIF and QBJ for QuickBooks Desktop as well as QBO. Anything below about Bank2QBO refers to ProperConvert as it is sold today.

Dates: the quiet way a QBO goes wrong

The most common bad QBO is not a missing file but a file with the wrong dates. A US statement prints 07/05/2026 for 5 July. A converter that reads it day-first turns it into 7 May — and does the same to every date whose day is 12 or lower, so roughly forty percent of a month's transactions land in a different month, while the rest look fine. QuickBooks imports it without complaint.

ProperSoft handles this by asking you to check the date order before converting. FlowParse decides it from the whole date column of the statement before converting any date: one date like 07/19 is enough to prove the statement is month-first, and one like 19/07 proves it is day-first. A month of transactions almost always contains such a date; if a short statement has none, the order cannot be proven and it is worth a glance in the review screen. The same rule runs for every export — QBO, QFX, OFX and the accounting CSVs.

Importing the file into QuickBooks

In QuickBooks Online, the .QBO goes in through the bank transactions screen's Upload from file option: choose the file, pick the QuickBooks account it belongs to, and the transactions appear in the For review list, where you match or categorise them. In QuickBooks Desktop, open the file through File → Utilities → Import → Web Connect Files and link it to an existing account or create one.

Because each transaction carries a stable ID, importing the same statement a second time — or two exports of it — does not post anything twice; QuickBooks recognises IDs it has already seen. If you need IIF or QBJ for QuickBooks Desktop, ProperConvert writes those and FlowParse does not. The PDF to QBO converter page walks through both QuickBooks imports with screenshots.

When the statement is a spreadsheet, not a PDF

Many banks let you download transactions as CSV or Excel instead of a PDF, and that is where Bank2QBO began. ProperSoft's own guide says such a file needs at least a date column and an amount column, and that a file with separate debit and credit columns may need its columns mapped by hand before it becomes a QBO.

FlowParse takes Excel and CSV statements as well as PDFs and reads the columns by their headers, in several languages: Date, Datum, Buchungstag, Fecha or Data for the date; Description, Verwendungszweck or Libellé for the text; Withdrawals and Deposits, Soll and Haben, or a single Amount, Betrag or Importe; Balance, Saldo or Solde. Separate debit and credit columns become one signed amount, and amounts written the European way — 1.250,00 — are read as 1,250. The rows then go through the same review screen as a PDF before you export the QBO.

What FlowParse does not take is a finished bank file: if what you have is a QFX, OFX or an old QBO that QuickBooks rejects, ProperConvert can convert it and FlowParse cannot.

More than one statement

A month-end for one client is often three or four statements; a year-end is dozens. FlowParse lets you drop several PDFs at once and get a .QBO for each, or put them through Smart Merge for one workbook: statements are sorted by date, the closing balance of each is compared with the opening balance of the next for the same account so a missing month stands out, and a transaction that appears in two files is flagged as a likely duplicate upload.

Smart Merge needs a free account and takes up to 5 files on the free tier, 20 on Starter and 100 on Pro. The merged workbook is for review and records; for QuickBooks you still import one .QBO per statement, which is how Web Connect expects it.

With a free account, every converted statement also stays in your history, so the .QBO can be downloaded again later without uploading the PDF a second time — useful when a client asks for a re-import after a QuickBooks clean-up, or when you need the Excel version of a statement you first exported as QBO. Each document in the history can be exported in any format, and deleted when you no longer need it; deleting it removes the extracted rows and the stored original at once. That is a different rhythm from a desktop app, where the files you produced live in a folder on one computer: here the record follows the account, from whichever machine you sign in on.

Trying it against a file you already have

The fastest way to decide is to convert one statement both ways. Take a PDF you have already turned into a .QBO with Bank2QBO or ProperConvert — ideally a US statement with dates early in the month, or a card statement — and upload it to the PDF to QBO converter on the free pages, without an account.

Compare the transaction count, the first and last dates and the ending balance, then import both files into a test company in QuickBooks and look at the register. If FlowParse's file matches and you only convert a few statements a month, you can stop paying for a subscription; if you also convert QFX or OFX files or need IIF, keep ProperConvert for those. Nothing stops you running both: one for the PDFs, the other for files that are already in a bank format.