Issues with Quicken Deluxe importing Categories and Splits via QIF?

nc3man

I was a user years ago and recently I needed a current version of Quicken to help a colleague with their bookkeeping.

I'm a s/w developer and used QIF formatted files before (~20 years ago) to import data. With a clean copy of the latest Quicken (Quicken Deluxe Subscription). I created a single category with two subcategories - see attached.

Stripe Payments (root)
└─ NCCC Dues
└─ NCCC Donations aMember
└─ NCCC Donations Web

I created an account 'NCCCtest' to test the QIF file I constructed with Import > QIF.

My test QIF file has only 5 transactions, inserted below since I could not attach a .qif file here.

, that map transactions into all the possible categories. There are two problems.

(1) The 5th transaction with the split is not even read.

(2 )Of the first 4 transactions amount, payee, memo are imported, but the Category is ignored. I build QIF files with code that had done this reliably before (long ago), but I suppose there could be an error.

On this community when I searched, I noticed some complaints about importing both categories and split payments with this latest Subscription version. Are these issues real? Can I revert to an early version? I swear that I wouldn't have had an issue with the version I last purchased (sadly 15-20 years ago and no longer have it).

!Type:Cat
NStripe Payments
E
^
!Type:Cat
NStripe Payments:NCCC Donations Web
E
^
!Type:Cat
NStripe Payments:NCCC Donations aMember
E
^
!Type:Cat
NStripe Payments:NCCC Dues
E
^
!Account
NNCCCtest
^
!Type:Cash
D2023-05-25
T4.55
MNCCC Donation $5.0
PKarl Rudnick
LStripe Payments:NCCC Donations Web
^
D2023-05-25
T9.41
MNCCC Donation $10.0
PKarl Rudnick
LStripe Payments:NCCC Donations Web
^
D2023-05-25
T4.55
MNCCC Donation $5.0
PKenneth Chin-Purcell
LStripe Payments:NCCC Donations Web
^
D2023-05-25
T19.12
MNCCC Single
PDavid Suarez
LStripe Payments:NCCC Dues
^
D2023-05-25
T28.83
MNCCC Membership + Donation $30.0
PKarl Rudnick
LStripe Payments
SStripe Payments:NCCC Dues
$19.22
ENCCC Single $20.0
SStripe Payments:NCCC Donations aMember
$9.61
ENCCC Donation $10.0
^

mshiggins

I would enter your test transactions in Quicken rather than importing. Then export to QIF. Compare the exported QIF with the QIF you constructed. Reformat your constructed QIF to match the exported QIF and retry the import with the reformatted QIF.

mshiggins

Glad that advice helped you to fix the issue :-)

nc3man

sorry for truncating the sub-categories in that attached image. Here you can see the full names.

nc3man

For grins, I ran my QIF file through QIF2QFX (Propersoft) and imported that. I got different behavior this time. At least the Splits displayed correctly in QIF2QFX, but when converting to QFX to import into Quicken, the split didn't show, but the 5 totals were correct as were the Payee and Memo columns. However Category were all "Other." Please don't tell me I need to spend more money.

nc3man

I did one more thing. In QIF2QFX, I exported my QIF import as CSV. Here, everything is shown correctly as designed.

I guess the conclusion is that QIF2QFX has no issue with importing my QIF test example, but Quicken can neither import my original QIF, nor the QFX output of QIF2QFX, which could also be ProperSoft's fault. At least I know there is nothing wrong with the QIF files that my software generates.

mshiggins

I would enter your test transactions in Quicken rather than importing. Then export to QIF. Compare the exported QIF with the QIF you constructed. Reformat your constructed QIF to match the exported QIF and retry the import with the reformatted QIF.

nc3man

doh. Good idea. There were three issues. Seemingly minor was date format. Instead of D2023-05-25, it required D5/25'23. The second was for the split transaction, the L line code needed to read "L—Split—". Oddly those 2 errors were not independent. If I added "L—Split—" but hadn't repaired the date, the split transaction was ignored. Also the E line code for the split memos was misplaced. It needed to be before the amount. Delicate, but thanks for suggesting that @mshiggins

mshiggins

Glad that advice helped you to fix the issue :-)