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Make CSV imports more user friendly

Tominator

Quicken currently requires that the CSV file you wish to import must match the field structure that Quicken expects. This requires hand-editing the CSV file itself in an app like Excel or Access to insert fields, change field names, and/or insert data.

For example, one pain [Edited - Language] is requiring the ACCOUNT destination in the CSV file for each data record. I would venture that 99 out of 100 times, the user will be IMPORTING the CSV data into ONE particular Quicken account since the data will no doubt be downloaded FROM one unique bank or FI account at a time.

Also, it should be pretty easy for Quicken devs to program a field-matching front-end rather than, again, requiring the user to edit the CSV data and fields directly. Here's a fairly common means of field matching that many apps, including MS Outlook, use to handle external data imports. Given that many institutions are eliminating QFX exports in favor of CSV, Quicken should make the process more user-friendly. Some institutions, like Bank of America, have also limited the look-back of Quicken WebConnect downloads to THREE months. So if you are a new user, you may want historical data that's ONLY available via CSV.

Field Mapping Idea for CSV Quicken import.png

[Edited - Readability]

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Windows

File Import

Reviewed

Feature Request

CSV

idea

Status: Reviewed

Comments

Jim_Harman

Even better would be to allow the field mapping to be stored and remembered for each account. That way, if CSV importing is the only way a user can bring data into Quicken, you would not have to set it up each time, and it would work if the accounts are at different FIs that have different field layouts.

One way to simplify the Account setup would be to have an option to ignore the account mapping if any and import the all the data in the file into the current account.

Voted

Chris_QPW

As @Jim_Harman said, you definitely would want to have the mapping stored by account. Every financial institution does it differently.

Also, they shouldn't count on any kind of header since there may not be one, or even if there are the terms might be different. You are mapping a column in the CSV file to a field in Quicken. And if there isn't an amount in the column selected by the user the line should be rejected. This alone will allow it to pretty much avoid any kind of header/summary line. Another optional filter might be "require payee".

Amounts should also accept (123.45) as a negative amount.

In an ideal converter you would also handle this use case:

The above is the Mint CSV format. Note that all the amounts are positive, it looks at the Type field to determine if the amount should be positive or negative.

And notice that these terms won't be consistent across different financial institutions, so you have to prompt the user what each term means. And given that "pending" can't be determined I would think you need a "reject" so the question would be make it positive, negative, or reject.

I might add since it might come up, investment accounts are a completely different can of worms.

mshiggins

@Chris_QPW isn't this existing functionality with Import QIF? Which by the way works great!

Chris_QPW

Of course, that is exactly what I'm drawing all this from. But it isn't "Quicken", and as such ideally it would be better if Quicken Inc did this.

Full disclosure, I have definitely left out a lot of the edge cases that I had to put into ImportQIF over the years.