PDF to QFX converter

Knowing what is in the file is useful the day an import goes wrong: you can open it in a plain text editor — without saving — and see at a glance which account, which dates and how many transactions it holds.

A .QFX is a text file in the Open Financial Exchange format, version 1.0.2 — the older, SGML-style flavour of OFX that Quicken has read for decades. Open one in a text editor and you will see a short header, then a series of tags. Here is a shortened example of the start of a file built from a checking statement:

Quicken decides whether a downloaded transaction is new by its FITID. Two transactions with the same ID are treated as the same transaction, even if you import the file twice. A converter that leaves the ID blank, or gives every row the same ID, causes one of two failures: duplicates on every re-import, or real transactions silently dropped because Quicken thinks it already has them.

FlowParse builds each ID from the transaction's date, its position in the statement, its amount and its description. Two identical coffees on the same day still get different IDs, because their positions differ; the same statement converted again produces the same IDs, because nothing about the transactions changed. That is the behaviour Quicken expects from a bank's own download.

The ID cannot match a copy of the transaction that came from a different source — a bank feed in Quicken has the bank's IDs, not ours. If a period is covered by both, Quicken's matching will offer to pair them; accept the match rather than adding both.

Imported transactions arrive for review before they become part of the register. This is where Quicken earns its keep: it matches each payee against its own list, suggests the category it used last time, and lets you rename a bank's raw description — "POS 4471 SQ *CORNER CAFE" — to a payee you recognise.

The payee in the file is the statement's description, up to 32 characters, the limit the format sets; the full description travels in the memo. Set up Quicken's renaming rules once for your regular payees and every later import is cleaner. The first month takes the longest; by the third, most transactions are accepted with their categories already filled in.

If you prefer to categorise in a spreadsheet first — for a tax year, say — download Excel alongside the .QFX; our guide to categorising bank transactions shows a simple scheme.

Quicken is at its best when every account is in it — joint checking, each partner's own account, savings and the cards. Usually some of those banks support Quicken and some do not. Mix freely: connect the ones that work and feed the rest from statements.

Convert each account to its own .QFX and import each into its own Quicken account. Transfers between accounts then appear twice — once leaving one account, once arriving in the other — and Quicken can record them as transfers rather than as spending and income. With every account in, Quicken's net worth and spending reports describe the household rather than whichever accounts happened to have a connection.

Statements often print two dates: the date a transaction was made and the date it was booked to the account. The .QFX carries one posted date per transaction, taken from the statement's date column, and the file's period runs from the first to the last of them. Whether a statement writes dates day-first or month-first is decided from its whole date column: a US statement that prints 07/19 is month-first, so its 07/05 is 5 July, not 7 May. It is still worth a glance at the first rows in the preview before importing a year.

If your statement prints a second date column you want to keep — a value date, for instance — download Excel or CSV alongside the .QFX; those keep every column the bank printed, while the QFX format has room for one date.

Quicken downloads depend on each bank choosing to support them, and not every bank does. Smaller banks and credit unions in particular may offer a PDF statement and perhaps a CSV, but no Web Connect file and no direct connection. Some banks that once supported Quicken have dropped it or started charging for it; some support it only for personal accounts.

The PDF statement is the one thing every bank produces. Converted to .QFX, it gives Quicken the same kind of file a supporting bank would, for any account and any month you have a statement for. Because the conversion does not depend on the bank, it keeps working when the bank changes its online banking, merges with another bank or ends its Quicken support. The bank-by-bank pages note where each bank keeps its statements.

It also helps when a bank does support Quicken but its download is limited — to the last few months, to one account type, or to a format your edition will not read. Download the statements for the months you are missing, convert them, and Quicken gets a continuous history without waiting for the bank to change anything on its side.

A QFX file has no way to say "I might be missing a row". Quicken will import whatever it is given, so the check has to happen before the file exists. For a bank statement, the opening balance plus every transaction must equal the closing balance printed by the bank, and each row is checked against the running balance where the bank prints one. For a card statement, the previous balance plus purchases, cash advances, fees and interest, minus payments, must equal the new balance.

Signs are taken from the column each amount was printed in, so a deposit cannot slip into Quicken as a payment. If a check fails, the preview shows where before you download — see bank statement validation for what each result means.

A .QFX is Quicken's own bank-download format: OFX 1.0.2 with an Intuit tag, one account per file, a unique ID per transaction and the statement's closing balance at the end. FlowParse writes it from any bank's PDF statement — digital, scanned or photographed — after checking the statement against its own balances, and can combine a year of statements into one file.

Import it from inside Quicken, link it to the right account, accept the transactions and reconcile against the PDF. The .QFX, the .QBO for QuickBooks, the plain .OFX, Excel and CSV are all included on every plan. Keep the PDF statements as your records: the .QFX moves the transactions into Quicken, while the PDF remains the bank's own document — the one a lender, an accountant or a tax office will ask to see, and the one you reconcile against.