unofficial microsoft.public.money FAQ and A
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Q) My bank offers several formats of file for download and import. Which should I pick?
A) First, your two choices are QIF and OFX. Everything else requires some amount of conversion to one of these before Money will import it. See "How do I import from Excel (or .CSV or etc.)?" for more information on importing other formats.
If both QIF and OFX are offered, OFX is preferable. This is because OFX includes unique identifiers assigned by the bank to the account and the transactions. Money uses the unique identifiers in two ways that make OFX import better than QIF. First, once Money has associated the account identifier with a specific Account in Money, it will always import future files to the correct account. QIF asks every time and is very problematic if you accidentally give it the wrong answer. Second, Money stores the transaction identifiers with the imported transactions. Because it does this, future imports of a file that has the same transactions won't duplicate the transactions. Importing QIF files that overlap requires Money and the user to attempt to identify any transactions that appear to be duplicates. This isn't always as easy as it seems and is prone to error and requires extra user effort. QIF is the last choice of import format for these reasons.
Question nominated to the FAQ by Mark Horn; answer derived from postings by Mark Horn and Chris Cowles.
Please see this disclaimer if you are using Money 2005 or this comment if you are using Money 2006.
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| How to do things in Money: Downloaded transaction data Q) Money says my PIN for getting my account activity must be six digits. It’s four and works fine on their web site. What gives? |
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Last update: 10 December 2006 |
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