Download formats

David Reiser dbreiser at earthlink.net
Sun Apr 4 21:32:30 EDT 2010


On Apr 3, 2010, at 8:25 AM, Paul A. wrote:

> 
> I'm registered with Bank of America for online banking.  They offer the
> following choices for download formats:
> 	WEB Connect for Quicken 2007 and above 		
> 	Statement Download for Money 2007 and above 		
> 	Managing Your Money - QIF file (2 digit) 		
> 	Quicken and Microsoft Money - QIF file (4 digit) 
> 	Microsoft Excel Format 
> 	Printable Text Format 
> What is the right choice for GnuCash?  Or should I be looking for something
> else on their website?
> 
I'm pretty sure that both of the first two choices are some form of ofx. Either should work -- libofx strips any private tags (the things intuit adds to ofx to make it qfx) during the import. It's conceivable that the Money >2007 is .ofc, yet another slight variant of ofx. I haven't had any trouble with ofc's, but I don't have much experience.

The biggest advantage of ofx over qif is that duplicates are automatically managed with ofx and it's siblings because the format includes a unique ID for every transaction. Qif doesn't have a transaction ID. So if you import a qif file with transactions overlapping your last download, you'll have to manually squash duplicates. My credit union automatically downloads the last 30 days of data any time I click the download button. I'd go crazy handling duplicates if I had to use qif.

I'd suggest using the first choice to see if it works. None of the others will get you any more information, and the automatic duplicate rejection is really useful.

Dave
--
David Reiser
dbreiser at earthlink.net






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