Please support import and export of CSV file format

It's BS …. I've read lots of comments about the support hassle for Quicken if they did provided a converter. Well, don't give any support. I'd rather have a converter that I had to wrestle with than no converter at all.

@proshko I will disagree that it's BS. As Chris said, it's just not practical to have a feature within the product and then tell customers who have mismatched fields in an import and messed up their data file: "Well, we don't provide support for that type of import, so if you messed up your data import and your Quicken data file is a mess now, all we can suggest is that you revert to an older backup and try to move forward from there." You might rather have an "at your own risk" import feature, and you might be technically savvy enough to create a CSV import map to align the fields in a CSV file with the fields in Quicken Mac, including flipping positive and negative values where needed. But it's a 100% certainty that they would field support calls — and draw scathing criticism — from users whose years or decades of data got messed up due to user error with a misconfigured CSV import. Or who downloaded transactions from a financial institution and imported some CSV transactions, resulting in duplicates which QFX prevents. Or who imported a CSV file with dates that partly overlapped a date range they had already imported, creating duplicate transactions which QFX prevents.

Of course I understand why some users would really like to be able to import CSV files if their financial institutions provide no other connectivity or QFX download files; I just think its would be a land mine for Quicken, as well as for users who would mess something up and want/expect Quicken to help them fix it.

And s you noted, there are third-party data converters available for users who really need this import functionality which Quicken chooses not to support for the aforementioned reasons.

Perhaps if many more financial institutions stopped supporting QFX exports and Quicken connectivity, Quicken will have to adapt and tackle this issue, but I don't see it changing in the near future because of the issues involved.

While I think it is excellent that Quicken has now officially supported what was previously a little-used .csv import for former Mint users, there's nothing new here beyond the fact that Quicken has blessed it and provided the format documentation in a Help file. This .csv import functionality requires a lot of jumping through hoops for users who wish to import their transactions from a financial institution on a recurring basis.

First, each .csv export from a financial institution must be massaged to fit the exact format requirements for importing into Quicken. That's fair — to an extent; ;csv files don't have standardized fields or orders, so it makes sense that the user needs to map their data to import properly into Quicken. But Quicken will not simply read the first header row and import the data which follows into the appropriate fields; it requires that the user open the .csv file in a spreadsheet to:

• re-arrange columns to be in the exact order specified, including blank columns for fields which were not exported from the financial institution (such as Tags)
• fill in the required Debit/Credit column with the word "debit" or "credit" for each transaction
• fill in some value in the Account column for each transaction, even though this data is only placed in a Quicken's "Reference" field, which most users don't use
• (Optional) enter Category values, which must match the spelling of ones existing in Quicken exactly or they will create new Quicken categories
• Re-save the spreadsheet as a .csv file.

This requires a bit of work. For a one-time import of data from a financial institution export, it's not a huge amount of work for someone adept with working with spreadsheets. However, for someone who wants to regularly export from their financial institution (perhaps weekly or monthly) to import to Quicken, this massaging of the .csv file must be done each time.

the second hurdle is that each time a .csv file is imported, it creates a new Account in Quicken. So a user who imports transactions on a recurring basis must do the import, then select all the transactions in the newly-created Account, drag them to their existing account, and finally delete the now-blank new account. There is not — but should be — a way to specify in the import where to create a new Account or add to an existing one (similar to how connecting an account for downloading allows you to create a new account or link to an existing account).

So while the Quicken folks have checked this off as implemented, it comes with these important caveats users should be aware of. Quicken could make this process much, much easier for users if they allowed the import file to be in any order as long as the column headings are correct (or provided a field-mapping step during import), if they allowed transactions to be added to an existing account.