I am a user of quicken looking for a alternative personal accounting software. One thing that is important is seamless importing of credit card data from issuer web sites.
How good is the KMyMoney QFX importer?
Is it better than messing with CSV files?
Thanks.
I have no problem importing OFX (or the equivalent QFX) files. And, yes, it is much better than dealing with csv files, imho.
I’ve tested a handful of different personal accounting software, and honestly I think KMyMoney has given me the most reliably solid importer thus far.
I’ve imported OFX (Never used QFX but I’ll believe @Atheist), CSV, and QIF files all to KMyMoney, and they were all relatively painless. CSV’s were definitely the most painful though, as you do need to provide some input as to how the data is formatted, but the wizard for that is good enough, at least for my use case. I’ve heard about using AqBanking for importing data but since I’m in the US it’s not really an option, and thus haven’t researched it much.
My honest advice would be to simply install it and throw in a file or two to see if it works for you, if able.
@acetakeer: Thanks for your reply. One correction on my end. I meant OFX.
Quicken has the advantage that downloading data from a credit card issuer and importing is one step, but if the import into KMyMoney is reliable than I was thinking of writing an AI agent to perform the d/l and then have the agent import the data into KMyMoney. Have you (or anyone else) tried this?
Thanks.
QFX is essentially identical to OFX, but with some Intuit specific enhancements(?) which I’ve never identified. The problem in the US is that over the past few years, an increasing number of institutions have stopped providing OFX/QFX downloads. My personal belief is that institutions mostly outsourced that code to Intuit, who prefers the banks switch to their current process which uses a third party to aggregate your banking data and you actually download from them, not directly from the bank. The KMY handbook explains a bit why QIF is not as good as OFX, but it’s still more robust than CSV. For me, the current problem with the CSV interpreter is that it handles only one account at a time, and some of my institutions seem to change the layout and content of their CSV files on a random basis. It also requires different configurations for importing banking or investment transactions, although it can also handle stock and currency prices.
@achalk I’m not sure what you are talking or asking about the reliability of importing into KMyMoney. I’d say OFX and QIF import are definitely reliable. CSV import depends on how well you can map the csv columns into the fields needed for each type of import. I now have a set of Perl scripts for processing my Merrill Lynch and Bank of America CSV files, and I seem to need to modify them every few months. For ML, it separates a single CSV download into and investment and possibly a banking data file for each of my separate accounts. I’m happy to share it, but it is also specific for the set of Categories I use to track my investment activity, so it can’t be called generig or universal. You might get an AI agent to do some of that for you, I personally just don’t trust them enough.