Bank statement to QIF

Why QIF is still the safe choice

QIF is the oldest transaction format still in everyday use, and that is exactly why it works. It is plain text — one letter per field, one caret per record — with no vendor identifier, no licence key and no signature to validate. Quicken, GnuCash, Moneydance, MoneyMoney, Banktivity and AceMoney all import it, and none of them will refuse a file because of who generated it.

That last point matters. Quicken’s own QFX format requires a paid Intuit branding identifier issued to financial institutions, so a third-party QFX is rejected on principle. QIF has no such gate, which makes it the format that actually works when you are bringing your own data.

Dates are normalised before they can be misread

QIF carries no declaration of its own date order, so importing software falls back to its locale. A file written as 01/02/2024 means 2 January to one program and 1 February to another, and a whole statement can land in the wrong months without a single error message.

ConvertFin writes dates as an unambiguous four-digit-year MM/DD/YYYY, the Quicken convention. Day-first statements — common in the UK and Europe — are detected and rewritten rather than passed through for your software to guess at, and so are ISO dates like 2024-01-15.

Signed amounts, checked against the balance

The QIF T field is a signed amount, so direction is carried in the number itself. Most PDF statements print withdrawals and deposits in separate unsigned columns, which gives a naive converter nothing to work from. Where the statement has a running balance, we take the sign from how that balance moved, and tell you on screen whether every row reconciled before you download. The same self-check runs on every format we export.

What is in the file, and what is not

• Included: date, signed amount, payee and memo, as !Type:Bank records covering chequing, savings and credit-card transactions.
• Not included: categories. They map to your own chart of accounts, so we leave them for your software to assign rather than guessing.
• Not supported: investment records with securities and share counts — a different QIF record shape entirely.

Importing it

1. Drop the PDF onto the converter above and check the preview and the balance badge.
2. Download the QIF file.
3. In Quicken: File → File Import → QIF File, then choose the account. In GnuCash: File → Import → Import QIF, which walks you through account mapping.
4. Check the first and last transaction dates after import — the fastest way to catch a day/month mix-up in your software’s own settings.

Other formats, and other starting points

For QuickBooks use QBO; for Xero and Wave, OFX or CSV. If your bank already gave you a CSV or a QIF and you just need a different one, the file format converters handle that without a PDF in the middle. Everything runs in your browser — the details are on the security page.