A Canadian living in the Netherlands, QIF, OFX, MT940

[EvilEd]

I bank with ABN-AMRO in the Netherlands and they export MT940 or tab
delimited text files. MT940 / Swift seems quite common in Europe.

I bought Quicken XG last time I was in Canada. It installed great
although for some reason I had to set my computer's DNS to use the
same DNS that quicken.ca does (did a whois on quicken.ca) in order for
it to activate properly.

I can import my Canadian transactions fine, yay Quicken, yay
Scotiabank.

My MT940 transactions that I translated using this great utility
http://www.xs4all.nl/~csmale/mt2ofx/ seem to match the Scotia .qfx
file quite closely except for the <INTU.BID> line.

I tried importing the file (just double clicking on the .qfx file in
the output directory of mt2ofx) but no luck, gives the error below..

I made up an entry as well as trying out reusing other entries within
the fidir.txt file so I wouldn't immediately get the 'Could not verify
financial institution information when trying to import QFX file'
error message. Instead I got a lot of repeated attempts to connect to
a remote site (anyone try this with a packet sniffer).

I understand Quicken not having native support for ABN-AMRO, no
problem. But, not having the tools / not having the tools for very
much longer are disappointing (I read that .QIF is being discontinued)

I haven't yet tried this using a MT940 to QIF (does anyone know of a
direct process to go from one to the other? I've found MT2OFX and the
Linux OFX2QIF (found it in the Gnucash distribution). This will
probably be my next step.

Does this mean I am out of luck trying to manually import transactions
in the 'open' financian exchange format? Or is my growing frustration
with Intuit's anti-competitive behaviour unjustified...

(I put in lots of detail to hopefully start a thread that other folks
in the future can find when searching through Google's archives...
try searching for english MT940 links haha)

Thanks
Derek

[John Pollard]

EvilEd wrote:

> I haven't yet tried this using a MT940 to QIF (does anyone know of a
> direct process to go from one to the other? I've found MT2OFX and
> the Linux OFX2QIF (found it in the Gnucash distribution). This will
> probably be my next step.

If you import the tab delimited file into Excel, there are several
utilities (ranging from free to about $30 US) which can convert to QIF
for import to Quicken. Not sure whether that would be an improvement
over your "next step".

> Does this mean I am out of luck trying to manually import
> transactions in the 'open' financian exchange format?

That would be my guess. Others here may be able to give you more
insights, but I am thinking that Intuit does not want it to be too
easy to import QFX files, they might get cut out of the picture.

--
John Pollard
j underscore pollard at mindspring dot com
Please reply to newsgroup

[EvilEd]

Thanks John,
I think my next step will be to write a Perl handler to convert the
text file and send it back in QIF.

Cheers
Derek

"John Pollard" <willnotw...@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<bdvqcu$45i$1...@slb6.atl.mindspring.net>...

[EvilEd]

I got thinking about this problem I was facing.. it came down to this
-

I have bank accounts in different banks, not all of them are supported
by my Canadian version of Quicken.

I decided to look at the Linux 'gnucash' application.

Wow!

It imported my OFX files that were transcoded using the MT2OFX program
mentioned in my earlier posting (the one that took my MT940/Swift bank
files and converted them to OFX that Quicken XG absolutely refused to
read). It also let me use directly the Scotiabank files without any
changes !!

When I read about Quicken dropping support for supporting QIF imports,
the pain in the ass I had in installing the software recently, the
Quicken support guy (they have a web-based chat support tool) telling
me if Quicken doesn't recognize the financial institution, then
there's to be no importing of QFX files, and the simple fact that I do
not want to type in each transaction manually, it's quite
disappointing. heck, I'd write a quick screen scrape tool to convert
the transactions into QIF before I sit and type them each out. Except
many people importing QIF files seem to have problems with duplicate
transactions...

I'm certainly not going to use this program if I know that the banks I
am able to connect to are going to not be available at some point when
I'm forced to upgrade.

Sorry to vent publically, but Intuit has to know they've lost a
customer.

Derek