Glossary
What Is a QIF File?
A QIF file is a plain-text export of financial transactions, written in the Quicken Interchange Format that Intuit created for Quicken in the desktop era. Each line of the file carries a single value, and the first character of the line says what that value means. QIF is the ancestor of the whole Quicken and QuickBooks file family, and it is also the only member of it that Intuit stopped developing, so a QIF file you meet today is usually an old archive or an export from a program that never moved on.
TL;DRQIF is a plain-text Quicken export where a single letter labels each field and a caret closes each record. It is no longer developed, so an old QIF archive usually has to be converted before current software will take it.
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fields in a QIF record for the currency of an amount, and no identifier that lets the receiving program match an imported transaction against what is already in the account
One Letter per Field
A QIF record is a short stack of lines, each one a letter followed by its value. D holds the date, T the amount, P the payee, M the memo, and L the category or the transfer account. A line containing nothing but a caret closes the record, and the next transaction starts underneath it. Above the records sits a header line such as !Type:Bank or !Type:CCard that declares the kind of account the block belongs to, which is how one file can carry several accounts one after another.
A transaction divided between several categories is written as extra lines attached to the same record, one group of lines per part. Those parts belong to the transaction above them and are not transactions in their own right; adding them up alongside the parent record is the usual way a QIF archive ends up showing twice the money it holds.
What a QIF File Looks Like
Open one in Notepad and a single bank transaction reads like this, one line per value:
!Type:BankD10/03/2026T-42.50PCity Water UtilityMOctober billLUtilities:Water^
The first line is the header and appears once per block. The next five lines are the record, and the caret closes it. A file with a year of history is simply this record repeated a few hundred times under the same header.
The Full Set of QIF Codes
The header names the block. Account headers are
!Type:Bank,
!Type:Cash,
!Type:CCard,
!Type:Invst,
!Type:Oth A for other assets and
!Type:Oth L for other liabilities. Lists use their own headers, such as
!Type:Cat for categories,
!Type:Class and
!Type:Memorized, and
!Account introduces an account definition.
Inside a record the codes most files use are these.
D date, T amount, and U, which some Quicken versions write as a copy of TP payee, with up to five A lines for the payee's addressM memo and N check numberC cleared status, an asterisk for cleared or X for reconciledL category, or a transfer account written in square bracketsS, E and $ for each split's category, memo and amount, with % when a split is given as a percentage
Investment blocks reuse N for the action, Buy or Sell for instance. The security goes on a Y line and the share count on a Q line, while I holds the price and O the commission.
Why a QIF Date Can Mean Two Things
The format says which line holds the date. It does not say how the date is written. Leading zeros on the month and the day may be dropped, the year may be four digits or two, and a short apostrophe form of the year is legal as well. Nothing inside the file states whether the first number is the month or the day, so 03/04/2026 is the fourth of March to one writer and the third of April to another, and both are valid QIF. Whoever reads the file has to know the convention of the program that wrote it, or work it out from days above twelve elsewhere in the same file.
QIF is expected to be plain ANSI text. A file saved as UTF-8 is not processed correctly on import, and accented or non-Latin payee names are where that shows up first. Nothing in the name or the extension distinguishes the two, so an encoding change made by a text editor on save is invisible until the import goes wrong.
Why Intuit Moved On
QIF was built for one program on one desktop, and two structural gaps kept it there. An imported transaction carries no identifier that the receiving program can match against the account, so reconciling an import against existing records was never reliable. An amount carries no currency at all. The replacement was the OFX family of formats, and its variants QFX and QBO are what Intuit ships today. Quicken 2006 stopped taking QIF into checking, savings and credit card accounts and pushed bank downloads towards QFX. Quicken's current help says that restriction has been lifted again, and today's Quicken for Windows imports QIF into any account type. QuickBooks has never read QIF at all.
Before converting an archive, look at the header lines. They tell you how many accounts the file actually holds, and a conversion that ignores them merges records that were meant to stay in separate accounts.
What Export QIF Means
Some banks and older finance programs still list QIF in their download or export menu, often labelled Quicken (QIF) next to QFX, OFX and CSV. Choosing it means the program writes your transactions as a QIF file in the format above, with no bank identifiers and a date layout of its own choosing. It is the most widely readable choice for old desktop software. For anything current it is the weakest, because nothing in it tells a new transaction apart from one already imported.
If the same menu offers QFX and you use Quicken, take QFX instead. A QFX download can also be read without Quicken, and the Store version of the QFX converter prints it as a PDF statement.
How to Open a QIF File
The right program depends on whether you want to import the data or just read it.
- Quicken for Windows imports it through File > File Import > QIF File. Back up the data file first, then choose the account the transactions belong to and the items to bring in.
- GnuCash, Moneydance and Banktivity import QIF as well, which makes them the usual landing place for archives from discontinued programs.
- Notepad opens any .qif, since the file is plain text, and the code list above is enough to read it. A PDF report has no such codes, but structured XML from a PDF gives every table row and heading its own tag.
- A converter turns the file into CSV for Excel or a PDF for printing, without any finance program installed.
Double-clicking a .qif on a Windows PC without Quicken only brings up the question of which app should open it.
Can You Import a QIF File into QuickBooks?
No. QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online both lack a QIF import, so the data has to change format first. There are three routes, and the right one depends on the QuickBooks you have.
- Convert QIF to QBO for a current QuickBooks Desktop or for QuickBooks Online. The file then goes in through Web Connect or the bank upload like any bank download, and the converter has to supply the bank's FID that QIF never carried.
- Convert QIF to IIF for an older QuickBooks Desktop that no longer accepts Web Connect files. IIF goes in through File > Utilities > Import > IIF Files; the format is described on the IIF page.
- Convert QIF to CSV when you would rather map the columns yourself in the QuickBooks Online upload.
Where QIF Files Still Turn Up
Old Quicken installations, discontinued personal finance programs and long-kept bookkeeping archives are the usual sources. A period that has to be retained for years often survives only as a QIF export, because the online statements behind it have long since rolled off. Getting that data into something current means converting it, either into QBO for QuickBooks, into CSV for a spreadsheet, or into PDF for a document you can hand to someone.
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