Viewing a qfx file

nhmartens

I'm having a discussion with my bank. I've been dowloading transactions from my account into Quicken for quite some time. Something strange happened this last December. When I imported the qfx file one transaction out of 6 was duplicated inside my Quicken database. However, that same transaction appeared only once in the statement I downloaded from the bank.

I need to view the contents of the qfx file but I don't know how to open it without it launching the Quicken app on my desktop.

Can you give me a clue how to do that? I'm very technically oriented. I've programmed computers for over 45 years from PCs to mainframes. So, I can read html and I can even read hex. Binary might be a challenge. I have no idea what the qfx file looks like in its raw format. I hope it's not encrypted.

Thanks.

MontanaKarl

It's just a text file.  Right click the QFX file and select Open With, then click on More Apps or whatever your version of WIndows shows so that you can scroll to and/or select Notepad.  Do NOT check the box to 'always open this app to open .QFX files'.

Alternatively, just launch Notepad and go to File > Open.  Then... be sure you change the filter to the right of the file name in the Open dialog from Text Documents to "All Files" so that it will let you see the qfx file to open it.

PS Only one of my FI's lets me download QFX.  Only did that for this test, as one step update works fine for me with all FI's.  Anyway, my bank says it downloaded a QFX; the file suffix is '.qfx' but when I open it, it gives me OFXHEADER and the data is bounded by <OFX> and </OFX> tags... so perhaps I'm looking at an OFX file in spite of it being called a QFX.  Don't know.  But, when in doubt, always try Notepad first.  If it's binary, you'll see gibberish.

nhmartens

Thank you. Sometimes I get so close to the forest that I fail to see the trees. After I sent the question I did try to open with Notepad and it worked. It's even readable.

I have another question. Is it possible for the financial institution to transmit more than one account in the same file? Would it be as simple as adding another set of lines starting with <ACCTID> and ending with <AVAILBAL>?

Chris_QPW

QFX files can certainly have more than one account in them at the same time, but it is a bit more complicated as far as the formatting is concerned than just concatenating one account after the other.

QFX is just the OFX standard with a few more fields.  You can find the OFX standard here:
https://financialdataexchange.org/FDX/FDX/About/OFX-Work-Group.aspx?a315d1c24e44=2

nhmartens

Perfect. This fills in all the blanks.

Now, I can go argue with my bank armed with information.

Thank you so much.