Can I open a QIF file in Excel?

Yes, as a text file, and you will see one field per row rather than one transaction per row. Excel will not rebuild the records into columns on its own because the fields are stacked vertically and separated by carets. Either convert the file to CSV first or use Power Query to pivot the code letters into columns.

Is QIF the same thing as QFX?

No. QIF is the older format described in this guide, with one field per line and no transaction IDs. QFX is a branded version of OFX, a tagged format with unique IDs and account identifiers that Quicken reads through Web Connect. They share two letters and a vendor and nothing else.

My bank offers both QIF and CSV downloads. Which should I use?

CSV, unless the software you are importing into specifically wants QIF. A CSV opens directly in a spreadsheet, usually has a header row that tells you the date format, and is accepted by every accounting package. QIF only has an advantage when it carries categories or cleared flags from another finance program that you want to keep.

The dates came in wrong after import. How do I fix a QIF file?

Delete the imported transactions first, since there are no IDs to match against and a second import will double them. Then either re-import with the date order set correctly, if your software offers the choice, or open the .qif in a text editor and use a regular-expression find-and-replace to swap the day and month on every D line before importing again.

Does a QIF file contain my account number or sort code?

Not in a standard bank export. There is no field for the account identifier in the transaction block, and the optional account section that Quicken adds to its own exports holds a name and type, not a number. This makes QIF files safer to email than an OFX file, which does include the account number, but it also means the software cannot tell which account the transactions belong to.

QIF files: what they are and how to convert one

A QIF file is a plain-text list of transactions in Quicken Interchange Format, a layout Intuit designed in the 1980s so Quicken could move data between its own files. Each transaction is a handful of lines, every line starts with a one-letter code, and a caret on its own line closes the record. The format has no account number, no unique transaction IDs and no declared date format, which is why it has fallen out of favour and why a QIF from a UK bank can load with every date wrong in software that assumes US order. If a bank or an old accounting program has given you a .qif file, this guide explains what is inside it, which software still opens it, and how to get the transactions into a spreadsheet or a current accounting package.

What a QIF file is

Quicken Interchange Format goes back to the early Quicken releases for DOS. It was built for one job: copying transactions, accounts, categories and memorised payees between Quicken data files. Because it was simple and documented, banks and other software vendors adopted it as an export format.

It is a text file. You can open one in Notepad or any text editor and read every transaction. There is no header describing the bank, the account or the currency. The file starts straight into a section marker and the first record. The specification assumes plain ASCII, and Quicken for Windows expects Windows-1252 text rather than UTF-8, so accented payee names from a UTF-8 export can arrive garbled.

What a file looks like

!Type:Bank
D03/04/2026
T-1200.00
PAcme Supplies Ltd
MInvoice 4471
N100234
CX
LOffice supplies
^
D03/05/2026
T3500.00
PClient B
MBACS receipt
^

Two transactions. The first is a payment of 1,200.00 to Acme Supplies by cheque 100234, marked reconciled and categorised as Office supplies. The second is a receipt of 3,500.00. Whether those dates are 4 March and 5 March, or 3 April and 3 May, the file does not say. More on that below.

The section header

The first line, !Type:Bank, tells the reader what kind of records follow. The common values:

Header	Records that follow
`!Type:Bank`	Current, checking or savings account transactions
`!Type:CCard`	Credit card transactions
`!Type:Cash`	Cash account transactions
`!Type:Invst`	Investment transactions, with extra codes for security, quantity and price
`!Type:Oth A` and `!Type:Oth L`	Other asset and other liability accounts
`!Type:Cat`	A category list rather than transactions
`!Account`	Account definitions, used in multi-account exports to say which account the next block belongs to

A bank export usually has one header and one account. A Quicken data export can chain several !Account and !Type: blocks in one file.

The line codes

Each line inside a record starts with a code letter and the rest of the line is the value. Order within a record does not matter, except that the S, E and $ lines of each split must stay together. The record ends at the caret.

Code	Field	Notes
D	Date	No format declared. Separators are normally / or ', though some bank exports use -. Years two or four digits.
T	Amount	Negative for money out, positive for money in. Some exporters include thousands separators; most do not. Newer Quicken exports repeat the same amount on a U line; treat U as a duplicate of T.
P	Payee	The counterparty or description.
M	Memo	Free text. Banks often put the full statement narrative here.
N	Number	Cheque number, or a word such as DEP, ATM or TXFR.
C	Cleared status	Absent means uncleared. An asterisk or c means cleared. X or R means reconciled.
L	Category	A category name, or an account name in square brackets for a transfer, such as [Savings]. A class can follow after a slash.
S, E, $	Split lines	Category, memo and amount for each part of a split transaction, repeated per split.
A	Address	Up to five lines, from cheque-printing records.
^	End of record	On a line by itself.

The date problem

QIF has no field that says which date order the file uses. D03/04/2026 is 4 March in the United States and 3 April in the United Kingdom, Australia and most of Europe. Quicken handled this by reading dates in whatever order the operating system was set to, which worked when the same person exported and imported on the same computer. It falls apart when a UK bank generates the file and software written for the US market opens it, or the other way round.

The failure is silent for days 1 to 12. A file covering the first twelve days of a month imports without complaint with every date transposed. Only when the reader reaches a day of 13 or higher does it reject the line or guess. Any importer worth using asks you to confirm the date order before it commits the file. If yours does not, check one transaction you can identify against the bank's PDF statement before accepting the import.

Two-digit years add a second guess. Quicken and Microsoft Money exports write the year after an apostrophe for dates from 2000 onwards, such as 3/4'26 or the space-padded 1/ 1' 5, a convention that not every reader understands.

What QIF leaves out

There is no account identifier, so the file cannot tell the receiving software which account it belongs to. You choose the account at import, and choosing the wrong one drops three months of transactions into the wrong ledger with no warning.

There are no transaction IDs. OFX and its Quicken and QuickBooks variants carry a unique reference per transaction so that a second import of an overlapping period is deduplicated; the OFX guide explains how. QIF cannot do that. Import the same month twice and you get every transaction twice, which is the most common QIF mistake.

There is no currency field and no balance field on a transaction. Quicken's own exports add an Opening Balance pseudo-transaction at the start of each account, and the optional account block can carry a statement balance, but bank exports almost never include either. A few put a running balance in the memo field. You cannot count on any of it.

Why Quicken stopped using its own format

With Quicken 2005 for Windows, Intuit removed QIF import for bank, credit card and investment accounts and kept it only for cash, asset and liability accounts, plus invoice and accounts-payable accounts in the Home & Business edition. The reasons were the ones above. The practical effect was to push banks toward QFX, the Quicken-branded OFX variant that banks must license, originally from Intuit and since 2016 from Quicken Inc. Because QFX is OFX with a few extra tags, other software such as GnuCash, Xero and QuickBooks Online reads it too; Quicken is simply the only program that insists on it.

Later Quicken releases relaxed the block in places, and Quicken's own help pages do not fully agree with each other about which account types accept QIF today. What is consistent is that QIF import in current Quicken does no duplicate matching, does not apply renaming rules, and cannot be used for Web Connect downloads, which must be QFX.

Software that still imports QIF

Plenty of software kept QIF import because customers kept asking for it. As of 2026, the list includes:

Xero, through Manual import on a bank account, alongside OFX, QFX, QBO and CSV. Xero lets you set the date format during import.
Sage Accounting, the cloud product, in the UK and Ireland, alongside OFX and CSV.
GnuCash, which has one of the more thorough QIF importers and copes with multi-account Quicken exports.
Money Manager Ex, KMyMoney, HomeBank and most other open-source personal finance programs.
Quicken for Mac, which still reads a QIF but only to create a new account. It cannot import into an existing account, so the workaround is to import into a new account and drag the transactions across.

QuickBooks does not import QIF into bank accounts. QuickBooks Online's upload wants a .qbo or .qfx file, or a three- or four-column CSV; QuickBooks Desktop's Web Connect import wants .qbo. The QuickBooks import guide covers both routes.

Converting QIF to CSV

Because QIF is plain text with one field per line, it converts to a spreadsheet cleanly once the date order is settled. Four ways to do it.

In the browser, free. The QIF to CSV tool reads the file in your browser tab, asks which date order to use when the file is ambiguous, shows the rows in an editable table, and writes CSV, Excel, a QuickBooks .qbo or a Xero CSV. Nothing is uploaded and no account is needed.

By hand, for a small file. Open the .qif in a text editor and, for each record, copy the D, T, P and M lines into four columns. Tedious past fifty transactions, but reliable.

With a spreadsheet. Load the file into a single column in Excel, then use the first character of each cell to route the rest of the value into a Date, Amount, Payee or Memo column, and the caret rows to mark where each record ends.

With a converter. stmtai accepts QIF as an input alongside PDF, scanned images, CSV and OFX, and writes Excel, CSV, QuickBooks .qbo or Xero CSV. Text formats such as QIF count as one page per 4,000 characters for pricing, so a typical monthly bank QIF is one or two pages. The balance check, which compares the transactions against the statement's opening and closing figures, runs only when the file carries a balance. Most QIF exports do not, so with QIF you get the transactions parsed and the date order confirmed, and the proof that nothing is missing comes from comparing the total against the PDF statement yourself. For what a good CSV looks like once you have it, see converting a bank statement to CSV.

Whichever route you take, check three things on the output: the date order against a transaction you recognise, the sign of the amounts (money out negative), and the number of rows against the number of carets in the source file.