Help
When a .qbo file is worth making, what has and has not been checked, and the limits you should know before you import. Short answers first; the details follow. The FAQ on the home page covers the converter itself.
Who is this for?
People who have a bank CSV or Excel export, or a QFX or OFX file, and need those transactions in QuickBooks, when the bank feed is not connected or the direct CSV upload does not take the file.
Do you need to convert at all?
Often not. QuickBooks Online uploads a CSV directly if it has 3 columns (Date, Description, Amount) or 4 columns (Date, Description, Credit, Debit), at most 1,000 lines and 350 KB. That is from Intuit's article “Manually upload transactions into QuickBooks Online”, last updated . If your export already fits, upload it as it is.
A .qbo file is worth making when:
- you use QuickBooks Desktop, which imports Web Connect .qbo files rather than CSV through its bank feeds;
- your export has extra columns, debit and credit columns under other names, no header row, or a date format the upload rejects, and you would rather not edit it by hand;
- you want the memo and the check number carried into the register;
- you have a QFX or OFX file from a bank or from Quicken and QuickBooks wants the Intuit header fields.
This site does not claim that a .qbo file avoids duplicates or imports more reliably than a CSV. That has not been verified.
“.qbo file” versus “QuickBooks Online”
They are two different things. A .qbo file is the Web Connect format: OFX 1.02 with Intuit's header fields, accepted by both QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online uploads. “QBO” is also the usual short name for the QuickBooks Online product. This site converts files; it does not connect to any QuickBooks account.
What has been verified, and what has not?
The file format has been checked by tests and by independent parsers. An import into a real QuickBooks company has not been done.
| Check | Result |
|---|---|
| Automated tests | 275 vitest cases (75 site, 200 engine), all passing on October 4, 2026, run on every change. They cover date formats including day/month ambiguity, sign conventions, decimals, blank rows, bad amounts, duplicates, special characters and the 1,000-line / 350 KB split. |
| Output format | 21 generated .qbo files parsed without error by two independent OFX libraries (ofxtools 0.9.5 and ofxparse 0.21) on September 23, 2026. These libraries ignore Intuit's private tags, so this does not prove QuickBooks accepts the INTU.BID values. |
| Real QuickBooks import | Not done. The QuickBooks Online Test Drive refuses uploads (“You can't upload a file in a sample company”, September 23, 2026). No import into a real or trial company has been performed. The bank presets' FI identifiers were taken from Intuit's financial institution directory and cross-checked against community reports, not against an import. |
If you import a file from this site into QuickBooks, the maintainer would like to know whether it worked: zebinpan08@gmail.com.
Supported inputs and outputs
In: CSV, Excel (.xlsx and .xls), QFX and OFX. Out: a .qbo file. Nothing else: no PDF statements and no QBO to CSV.
- Recognised automatically: Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citi, Capital One, American Express, U.S. Bank, PayPal, Stripe, Square.
- Any other CSV or Excel export, by mapping the date, description and amount columns.
- Wells Fargo's comma-delimited download, which has no header row.
- QFX and OFX files keep their transactions; only the header fields QuickBooks reads are set.
Known limits
The output follows QuickBooks Online's upload limits and the OFX 1.02 character set. In practice:
- A CSV or Excel conversion is split into several .qbo files when it passes 1,000 transactions or about 300 KB, to stay under the 350 KB limit. The QFX/OFX converter does not split; a very large file has to be split at the bank.
- OFX 1.02 is ASCII: accented letters lose their accent and any other non-ASCII character in a name or memo is written as
?. - Rows with a 0.00 amount are skipped, with a warning saying how many.
- Rows with the same date, amount and description are flagged as possible duplicates, not removed, until you click remove.
- PayPal, Stripe and Square have no Web Connect identifier of their own, so their files use a common bank's INTU.BID (03000); QuickBooks may show that bank's name during import.
- The account number is a placeholder (0000) unless you type the last digits of the real account.
Common import errors
None of these has been seen here in QuickBooks, because no real import has been done yet. The explanations come from Intuit's documentation and QuickBooks community threads.
- OL-221 or OL-222
- They are generic parsing errors: QuickBooks could not read the file it was given. Common causes are an unsupported date format, an empty description column, or a statement that was edited in a spreadsheet and saved with a stray column. Re-converting from the original download usually fixes it.
- “The file you selected is not supported”
- That message almost always means the file is not a valid Web Connect file, or the account type is wrong. Check that you picked credit card for a credit card and checking for a bank account, then download again — the account type changes the whole structure of the file.
- Amounts the wrong way round
- Some card issuers export charges as positive numbers. Open the column mapper and tick "flip the sign of every amount", or switch to the preset for your issuer, which already knows the convention.
- Only 90 days of transactions
- A connected bank feed usually brings in recent history only, commonly 90 days. Uploading a file is the usual way to add older transactions; how far back QuickBooks accepts an uploaded file has not been tested here.
For QuickBooks Desktop, Intuit's article “Fix Web Connect import errors” lists the Web Connect messages and what to try.
Try it with sample data
Three fictional files, and the .qbo the engine makes from each. All names and amounts are made up. The table is generated from the engine's output, not typed by hand.
| Input | Output | Rows | Written | Money in | Money out | Warnings |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| sample-checking.csv | sample-checking.qbo | 12 | 11 | $1,450.12 | $381.82 | Skipped 1 summary, header, pending or zero-amount row(s). 1 group(s) of transactions share the same date, amount and description. Review them before importing. |
| sample-creditcard.csv | sample-creditcard.qbo | 8 | 8 | $538.10 | $597.56 | None |
| sample-bank.qfx | sample-bank-converted.qbo | 8 | 8 | $2,620.00 | $986.42 | None |
The converters on the home page and the QFX page load the same files from their “Try a sample” links. The time stamp inside a .qbo you make will differ from these; nothing else should.
Who runs this?
QBO Ready is an independent, one-person project. It is not affiliated with Intuit or any bank. Contact: zebinpan08@gmail.com. The site counts page views with Cloudflare Web Analytics and nothing else; the privacy page lists exactly what that reports.
Changes
- OFX to QBO page live, wording corrected on pages that described unbuilt features, fictional sample files, this help page. Cloudflare Web Analytics (page views only, no cookies) is on and described on the privacy page.
- QFX and OFX to QBO converter; the site moved to static hosting on Cloudflare and the feedback and waitlist forms became email links.
- AI crawlers explicitly allowed in robots.txt, an llms.txt file, two more blog posts.
- First release: the CSV and Excel to QBO converter with ten bank presets, the bank guides and the blog.
Last updated .