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QIF, QFX, OFX and CSV: The Bank File Formats Explained

What QIF, QFX, OFX and CSV files are, what each one actually contains, which to choose when your bank offers several, and how to avoid duplicate transactions.

By The Kemback team · May 6, 2026 · 5 min read

Go to your bank’s download page and you may be offered a list of choices: Quicken (QFX), Money (OFX), QIF, CSV, sometimes more. They all hold your transactions, but they aren’t interchangeable. Picking the right one saves time, prevents duplicate transactions and keeps details you’d otherwise lose.

Here’s what each format is, what’s inside it, and which to choose.

The short answer

If your app accepts it, choose OFX or QFX for regular bank downloads. They carry a unique ID for every transaction, which lets software skip ones it has already seen. Use CSV when nothing else is offered, or when you want to look at the data in a spreadsheet. Use QIF mainly for moving history out of Quicken, where it keeps splits and categories.

OFX: Open Financial Exchange

OFX is an industry standard created in the late 1990s by Intuit, Microsoft and CheckFree for exchanging financial data. Early versions use an SGML-style layout; later versions use XML. Either way, it’s text, and a single transaction looks something like this:

<STMTTRN>
  <TRNTYPE>DEBIT
  <DTPOSTED>20250114
  <TRNAMT>-62.18
  <FITID>202501140003
  <NAME>CITY MARKET #212
</STMTTRN>

What matters here:

  • TRNAMT is signed: negative for money out, positive for money in. No guessing.
  • DTPOSTED is a full date in year-month-day order, so there’s no confusion between US and European date styles.
  • FITID is the bank’s unique ID for the transaction. Download the same week twice and good software will see the same FITIDs and skip them.
  • The file usually includes the account number (often partly masked) and an ending balance, which helps you check your totals.

OFX doesn’t carry your own categories. It’s a statement from the bank, not a record of how you’ve organized things.

QFX: Quicken’s version of OFX

QFX is OFX with a few extra Intuit-specific fields, used by Quicken for its “Web Connect” downloads. In practice, a QFX file has the same structure and the same unique transaction IDs as OFX.

Banks have to work with Intuit to offer QFX for Quicken, which is why some banks offer it and others don’t. Many apps other than Quicken can read QFX files because they ignore the extra fields. If your bank offers both QFX and OFX, either usually works in a non-Quicken app; try OFX first.

QIF: Quicken Interchange Format

QIF is older and simpler: a plain text format Quicken has used for decades. A transaction looks like this:

!Type:Bank
D01/14/2025
T-62.18
PCity Market
LFood:Groceries
^

Each line starts with a letter code: D for date, T for amount, P for payee, L for category, M for memo, and ^ ends the transaction. Splits use S (category), E (memo) and $ (amount) for each line. A transfer is written as a category in brackets, such as [Savings].

QIF’s strengths and weaknesses come from the same simplicity:

Strengths:

Weaknesses:

  • No unique transaction IDs. Software can’t tell whether a transaction is new or one it has seen before, so importing an overlapping date range can create duplicates unless the app checks carefully.
  • Ambiguous dates. Is 03/04/2025 March 4th or April 3rd? It depends on settings, and some older files use two-digit years with an apostrophe, like 1/14'25.
  • No account balances. You’ll need to check those yourself.

For those reasons, Quicken itself moved away from QIF for everyday bank downloads years ago, in favor of QFX. It’s still the standard way to export from Quicken.

CSV: comma-separated values

CSV is a spreadsheet saved as text: one row per transaction, columns separated by commas.

Date,Description,Amount
01/14/2025,CITY MARKET #212,-62.18
01/15/2025,PAYROLL ACME CORP,2450.00

Almost every bank offers CSV, and every spreadsheet opens it. But there’s no standard layout. Banks differ in:

  • Column names and order. “Date”, “Posting Date”, “Transaction Date”.
  • Amounts. One signed column, or separate Debit and Credit columns, or a positive amount with a Type column.
  • Date formats. 01/14/2025, 2025-01-14, 14/01/2025.
  • Extra rows. Some files start with account details or end with a totals row.

That’s why importing a CSV usually involves a mapping step, where you tell the app which column is which. Good apps remember the mapping for next time.

CSV also has no unique transaction IDs, so overlapping downloads need care.

A worked example: choosing for three accounts

Suppose you’re setting up a new app and download from three places:

  • Checking at a large bank: offers QFX, OFX, CSV and QIF. Choose OFX. You get signed amounts, unique IDs and an ending balance to check against.
  • A credit union savings account: offers only CSV. Fine. Download it, map Date, Description and Amount once, and keep each download’s date range tidy (for example, always the first to the last day of a month) to avoid overlap.
  • A store credit card: offers QFX and PDF statements. Choose QFX. Check the sign: on a credit card, a purchase should lower your balance (make you owe more), and a payment should raise it.

Then, for each account, compare the app’s balance after import with the balance on the bank’s website. If they match, you’re set.

Avoiding duplicate transactions

Duplicates are the most common import problem. To keep them away:

  • Prefer OFX or QFX, whose transaction IDs let software skip repeats.
  • Use non-overlapping date ranges for CSV and QIF: download “last month” each month rather than “last 90 days” each week.
  • Don’t edit files before importing unless you need to. Changing a description can make a repeat look new.
  • Check the import preview if your app shows one, and look at the count of new versus skipped transactions.

Which file does Kemback take?

Kemback imports OFX, QFX, QIF and CSV files from any bank. It shows a preview before anything is saved, remembers your CSV column mappings, and checks each import against what’s already there so the same transactions aren’t added twice. You can undo an import as a batch if something doesn’t look right.

#file formats #bank downloads #importing

This article is general information, not financial, tax or legal advice. For decisions about your situation, talk to a qualified professional.

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