Cant manually import Amercian Express Personal Savings QFX file

Rob N

MBP M3 / Mac Sonoma 14.4.1 / Quicken 7.6.1

I am not able to connect to my AmEx Banking Personal Savings account in Quicken. The AmEx rep said that Mint / Quicken have been disallowed due to "privacy reasons". So I went to the manual import QFX file method, which I use with [Removed - 3rd Party Software]. In [Removed - 3rd Party Software], with manual input, all transactions are Output so I have to manually edit Input transactions.

However, when I import QFX into Quicken, I get the following error:

"Unable to read the selected Web Connect file. Please contact your financial institution."

Quicken Support could provide no more insight. In VS.Code, the QFX file looks like a proper XML file.

Is there a way to find the Quicken log and see the specific issue with the file?

Quicken Kristina

Hello @Rob N,

Assuming that Quicken Support already walked you through the troubleshooting available on our end, you would want to contact the financial institution for further assistance.

To answer your question about seeing Quicken's log files, to view them, in your Quicken program go to Help>Show Logs in Finder.

That will bring up the Finder window with your logs (Sample image below).

I hope this helps!

Rob N

Thank you @Quicken Kristina I wish I had seen your reply while on a 2-hour call with Jorge from Quicken Support. With your reply, all I had to do was find the ConsoleLog.txt which showed kCFXMLTreeErrorDescription = "Encountered malformed start tag"; when importing the AmericanExpress.QFX. Then I found a thread from @sashk that said to edit the 2nd line of the QFX file by adding a leading and ending ? per the example below. I used VS.Code on Mac to edit the top of the QFX file.

Previous AmEx file:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?><OFX CHARSET="1252" COMPRESSION="NONE" DATA="OFXSGML" ENCODING="USASCII" NEWFILEUID="NONE" OFXHEADER="100" OLDFILEUID="NONE" SECURITY="NONE" VERSION="102">

Solution:
In the first 2 lines, add 2 ?'s and <OFX>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?><?OFX CHARSET="1252" COMPRESSION="NONE" DATA="OFXSGML" ENCODING="USASCII" NEWFILEUID="NONE" OFXHEADER="100" OLDFILEUID="NONE" SECURITY="NONE" VERSION="102"?>
<OFX>

Error Details:
ConsoleLog.txt error for "Unable to read the selected Web Connect file. Please contact your financial institution."

Error: {
kCFXMLTreeErrorDescription = "Encountered malformed start tag";
kCFXMLTreeErrorLineNumber = 1;
kCFXMLTreeErrorLocation = 200;
kCFXMLTreeErrorStatusCode = 9;
}
2024-04-09 14:58:11.880 Quicken[688:5416] reportException:extraData:, exception = Encountered malformed start tag, extraData = (null)
2024-04-09 14:58:11.880 Quicken[688:5416] reportException:extraData:, exception = Encountered malformed start tag, extraData = (null)
2024-04-09 14:58:13.128 Quicken[688:179909] Reports sent.
2024-04-09 14:59:15.029 Quicken[688:5416] ERROR: Could not import file: /Users/RobNeff_1/Downloads/AmEx March-April.QFX

Rob N

This is the full explanation from @sashk

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7938407/unable-to-import-transactions-from-american-express-savings-account

Quicken Kristina

Thank you for the follow up,

I'm glad to hear you were able to resolve the issue. Thank you for coming back to share the solution you found!

If you need further assistance, please feel free to reach out!