Cal:

You did answer my basic question which was as you said: if both qif and ofx
are available, which is preferred. The bank I'm working with has ofx
available for download via their "consumer" avenue, but I'm trying to
impliment some processes for a commercial situation, and the bank has not
made ofx available through that system. So, we're trying to determine which
avenue is best for accessing the info from the bank, then impliment our
solution based on the best data source.

qif is working, so far, for our test run...just trying to look at all
angles...

"Cal Learner-- MVP" wrote:

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In microsoft.public.money, David B wrote:

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Don't get me wrong. QIF is still very good. I had assumed that you
were asking if both were available, which would be better to choose.

For bank and credit card statements, the only real problem for those
in the US using US banks is that two apparently identical
transactions (same date, payee and amount) are treated as one. So in
that case, you would need to add the missing transaction manually.
You might also have to identify which account a given download goes
to also. Plus OFX can download more than one account in the same
file.

So I don't think this would be worth lobbying the bank over. Now if
the bank were to add a direct download OFX server, that would be
really nice. Credit cards usually do that, but only a minority of
banks do that, unfortunately.


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Thank you for the replies. It seems to me that I've read that the OFX file
format is intenteded to become the "standard" for transaction data, and that
QIF might have limited or reduced support moving forward. I am working with
our bank to determine if an OFX format is available over QIF, and if so, when
that might be implimented. I'm also working on some converters to add
category/subcategory information to the bank data prior to import by Money...

"Cal Learner-- MVP" wrote:

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In microsoft.public.money, Dick Watson wrote:

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OFX does not know Category or Subcategory. Like QIF, it knows Payee
and maybe Memo. Unlike QIF, it also knows stock/fund symbols if
applicable.

So I was approaching it as given the choice, which is better: that
would be OFX. Category gets learned by Money from previous
association with the Payee, as it does in QIF downloads.

I think QIF in this case is also server to client. I suspect that
Money's use for export+import was beyond the original purpose of QIF
as used by Quicken, but I am not sure of that.

Back to the OPs question: but does OFX know Category/Subcategory? I've never
looked at the spec, but my assumption has been that QIF is essentially
processed data peer-to-peer. I.e., exporting Money transactions to another Q
or M peer. Conversely my perception is that OFX is FI Server-> PFM client.
This seems like a transaction type where categories/subcategories are not
really relevant.

My ignorance may be showing.

"Cal Learner-- MVP" <via_newsgroup[at]please.tnx> wrote in message
news:7iu8f2tvs3732rvsd3lheerl1np31nnakn[at]4ax.com...
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In microsoft.public.money, David B wrote:

- quote -

Downloading OFX files is better than downloading QIF files.
In an OFX file, each transaction has a unique ID which lets Money
know if it has seen that transaction before. Thus Money can avoid
duplicates while not removing twin transactions. Also Money uses
a universal date method that does not have the mm/dd/yy or dd/mm/yy
ambiguity that QIF can have.

I am working with a trial version of Money 2007, testing some file import
options. I've discovered, via this newsgroup and other sources, that Money
has some limitations in how it imports categories and subcategories. I
believe I saw that Money can import both .qif and .ofx files. Does an .ofx
file import offer more options for importing category and subcategory data?