CSV to IIF Converter: Convert CSV to IIF for QuickBooks Desktop

The table above splits along one line: whether you want QuickBooks to check your work. A .qbo goes through Bank Feeds, so QuickBooks compares each transaction against the register, flags the ones it already has, and waits for you to accept the rest. An IIF skips all of that and writes. If you are loading a month of checking or credit card activity, take the .qbo. Reach for IIF in the narrower cases: an account with no Bank Feeds setup at all, transactions that need to hit named expense accounts on the way in, or record types like bills and journal entries that a .qbo cannot carry in the first place.

Upload the CSV, XLS or XLSX your bank or card issuer exported. The converter reads the columns, works out which is the date, the description and the amount, and shows you the parsed transactions before anything is written. Confirm the account name and whether it is a checking or credit card account, because that name becomes the account every transaction posts to inside the IIF. Then download the .iif. The same parsed data is available as .qbo, .qfx, .ofx, .qif, XLSX and CSV, so you do not have to decide the destination format before you upload.

Back up the company file first, then go to File, then Utilities, then Import, then IIF Files, and choose your .iif. QuickBooks 2019 and later scans the whole file before it writes anything, imports the rows that pass and, if any fail, writes a fresh .iif containing only the failures with ERROR appended to the name. Open that file in a text editor or Excel, fix what it flags, and import just that one. The backup matters because of the next question.

No. There is no undo for an IIF import anywhere in QuickBooks Desktop. The transactions are written into the register as if you had typed them, so the only clean reversal is restoring the backup you took beforehand. If you skipped the backup, you are deleting transactions by hand, and on a few hundred rows that is a long evening. This single behavior is the strongest argument for using a .qbo whenever the data is ordinary bank activity, because a Web Connect batch sits in the review queue until you accept it.

No. IIF is a QuickBooks Desktop format and QuickBooks Online has no IIF import anywhere in the product. Online accepts CSV, XLS and XLSX for list imports, and .qbo, .qfx or .ofx for bank data. If you work in Online and somebody hands you an IIF, the data has to be rebuilt in a format Online reads, which for bank and card activity means a CSV upload or a .qbo file. The full breakdown of what each edition accepts is in our guide to the IIF file format in QuickBooks.

Three header rows declare the layout, beginning with !TRNS, !SPL and !ENDTRNS, which is how every IIF tells QuickBooks what its columns mean. Each transaction is then written as a three line block: a TRNS row posting the amount to the account you named, a SPL row carrying the same amount with the sign reversed, and an ENDTRNS row closing the block. Money in is typed as a DEPOSIT and money out as a CHECK. Because a block has to balance to zero, the offsetting side has to go somewhere, and it goes to Uncategorized.

Because a bank CSV does not say what anything was for. It has a date, a description and an amount, and nothing that identifies an expense account. Any converter that claims to categorize a raw bank export is guessing. Ours posts the offsetting split to Uncategorized so the import is honest and balanced, and you assign real accounts inside QuickBooks where the vendor names and account list already exist. If you want the accounts decided before import, add a category column to the spreadsheet first and it will carry through.

No, and this is the trap that catches people re-importing an overlapping date range. QuickBooks does not deduplicate IIF imports. Import January twice and you get January twice. A .qbo behaves differently because every transaction in it carries a FITID, a unique identifier that QuickBooks records and then skips if it sees it again, which is why an overlapping Web Connect download does not double up. Our converter does write a stable ID into the IIF TRNSID field, and re-exporting the same file produces the same IDs, but QuickBooks itself does not check that field on import. Track your date ranges, or use the .qbo. There is more on how that identifier works in CSV vs QBO file.

Because it never had that feature. QuickBooks Desktop cannot import a bank or credit card CSV in any version or year, including Pro, Premier and Enterprise. The Import Excel and CSV toolkit that Intuit publishes covers four list types, customers, vendors, items and the chart of accounts, and no transactions at all. That gap is the entire reason CSV to IIF and CSV to QBO converters exist. QuickBooks Online is the edition that can take a bank CSV directly, capped at 350 KB and 1,000 rows per upload in a strict three or four column layout.

A date, a description and an amount, at minimum. A single amount column should be positive for money in and negative for money out, using a minus sign rather than parentheses, and with no currency symbols. Separate Debit and Credit columns work too, which is what Capital One and several other issuers export. Leave a cell blank rather than typing zero. If a day of the week is sitting in the date column, split it out. The column-by-column detail is in the QuickBooks CSV import template, and date traps specifically in QuickBooks CSV import date format.

For a one-off file of a few dozen rows, sometimes. The gap shows up on volume and on trust. Free browser tools generally cap the row count, do not keep a column mapping between sessions, and give you no support when a bank changes its export layout mid-quarter, which they do. Several also stop at IIF and cannot write a .qbo, which means the moment you decide Bank Feeds is the safer route you are shopping again. If you are a bookkeeper closing several clients a month, the thing worth paying for is not the conversion, it is not having to re-solve the same file every time. Our head-to-head of the paid options is in the best CSV to QBO converters.