coded ruminations

Since Quicken 2005 QIF imports have no longer been allowed. However, this shouldn’t present a problem for people since OFX imports are allowed. For example, you would think that you could download the Mircrosoft Money OFX format of your data, change file extension to QFX, and everything should import fine (after all the “O” in OFX is for “OPEN”!). There is a catch. If your Financial institution has not signed up with Quicken to allow OFX imports, then you are out of luck, because Quicken requires a non standard INTU.BID tag to be inserted into the standard OFX document.

What happens when this tag is missing is: 1) You download a file in OFX format that has your transaction information in it. 3) You try to import this file into Quicken 4) You get the following error “Quicken is currently unable to verify the financial institution information for this download. Please try again later.”.

To get around this problem you have to edit the OFX file and add the custom Intuit OFX tag into the file. This tag must be followed by the BID of a financial institution that Quicken has set up to support web downloads. On Windows 2000 this information resides in the file C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Intuit\Quicken\Inet\Common\Localweb\Banklist\fidir.txt. The BID number is the on the left. To find out if the institution that you want to use supports Web Connect check that the name of your institution is followed by the value “WEBONLY”. For example, say that your Instution is “1st Centennial Bank” which according to the fidir.txt file has a BID of “00495″. In the OFX document look for the SONRS tag. Within <sonrs> … </sonrs> will be the language default. Right after the language default enter the custom tag <intu .BID> followed by the BID number that has Web Connect support. Save the file, and attempt again to import it. This time Quicken will see the number, and verify that the institution supports Web Connect, and then load your data.

BTW, once your transactions are imported, your Institution is greyed out. If you ever need to change your institution you have to deactivate the transaction download setting in the Account Online Services configuration. After doing so the Institution field is writable once again.

To convert between QIF and OFX try OFX Writer. The shareware version allows conversions for up to 100 transactions. The 101 th transaction converted is 49 USD. Using the above guidelines this is only necessary if you do not have access to an OFX formatted file.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 21st, 2005 at 4:12 pm and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.