Quicken QFX import errors, and how to fix them

Why QFX needs a bank ID at all

QFX is Intuit’s variant of OFX for Quicken, and like QBO it carries an INTU.BID tag naming the financial institution. Quicken checks it for the same reason QuickBooks does: the file is meant to have come from an institution that pays to participate, and the tag is how that is asserted.

A file without a valid BID is not a slightly-imperfect QFX. As far as Quicken is concerned it is not a QFX at all.

"The financial institution is not supported"

The BID is missing, empty, or not on Quicken’s list. Find your bank’s real number inside any QFX or QBO the bank itself issued — the INTU.BID line, near the top of the file — and use that.

Where the bank issues neither, there is no number to find. QIF is the way in: older, less specified, and it requires no institution at all.

"The file is not a valid QFX file"

Structural rather than identity. Check the first line is OFXHEADER: rather than markup, and that the file closes with </OFX>. A file that begins <?xml is OFX 2.x, which Quicken generally will not accept where it expects the older SGML form.

Transactions import but the account is wrong

Quicken matched the file to an existing account by its ACCTID. If that number belongs to a different account than you intended — or the file carries a masked number while Quicken holds a full one — transactions land in the wrong register.

1. 1Undo the import before doing anything else. Quicken can reverse the most recent one.
2. 2Compare ACCTID in the file with the account number recorded on the Quicken account.
3. 3Reconcile them, then import again and confirm the target account on the prompt rather than accepting the default.

Everything imports twice

Quicken deduplicates on FITID, exactly as QuickBooks does. A converter that regenerates FITIDs on every run — from a timestamp, or a row number — defeats it entirely. Convert the same statement twice and compare the FITID values; if they differ, re-importing will always duplicate.

Import, or add to Quicken?

Quicken has more than one path for the same file, and they behave differently. Opening a .qfx by double-clicking hands it to Quicken’s Web Connect handler, which tries to match it to an account automatically. File → File Import → Web Connect File gives you the prompt instead.

When a file has landed in the wrong account, the second path is the one to use next time. It is also the one to use for any statement older than the account’s current download range, where the automatic handler is most likely to guess wrongly.

When One Step Update fights the import

If the account is also set up for direct download, Quicken may be holding transactions from the same period. Importing a file over them produces two copies of everything the connection already fetched, because the FITIDs in your file and the bank’s own will not agree.

Import files only for periods the connection does not reach. Where the two must overlap, deactivate the download for the account first, import, and reconnect afterwards.

QFX or QIF, when you have the choice

• QFX carries an institution, so Quicken treats the transactions as bank data — matching, deduplication, the full path. It needs a valid BID.
• QIF has no institution and no FITIDs. It always imports, and it never deduplicates, so each file must be imported exactly once.
• Newer Quicken releases restrict QIF import to certain account types. Check before planning around it.