I was wrong.
Once you have chosen which accounts to include, click 'Next' twice to continue. IBank will prompt you to enter a name for the QIF file and choose the location where it should be saved. Click 'Save' to complete the export process. Open the iBank document you want to export and choose File Export. Using the drop-down menu button. Note the Windows program is 32-bit and will not run on your operating system, that is why it has to be run on the server. This just puts the data in a format that Quicken Mac knows how to read and convert into its data file format. Quicken Mac will then use the.QXF file to create your new Quicken Mac data file and delete the.QXF file. Like many others, I bit the bullet and moved from a Windows PC using Quicken to a Mac, and initially went with iBank 4. Had been using Quicken for about 10 years and iBank4 for 18 months. Recently, I upgraded to iBank 5 and there are definite improvements in downloading investment transactions - now gets commission right, as well as option.
That’s not something anyone likes to admit, but when I’m wrong, I’m wrong, I’ll admit it.
Some quick background for any readers who are experiencing my personal saga with Macintosh Finance software for the first time. Back in February of 2010, I was terribly frustrated with the direction that Intuit was taking with Quicken for Macintosh, or the lack thereof. I vented that frustration in my article titled, Quicken Essentials 2010 for Mac. Why Bother? I fired up the Macintosh Quicken community. So much so that I got the attention of senior people inside the Intuit organization. I ended up interviewing Aaron Patzer, the GM/VP of Personal Finance at Intuit, and the founder of Mint.com, which had just been acquired by Intuit. You can read about that interview in my article Intuit Responds – Quicken Essentials 2010 for Mac. That was when I found iBank. I was looking for alternatives to Quicken, and iBank seemed like a good choice. I wrote a review of iBank 3: iBank – Your Quicken Alternative. Finally, I had a decision to make: Quicken Essentials or iBank 3? You can read my conclusion in the article Quicken Essentials for Mac – The Bare Minimum. I recommended that previous Quicken users go ahead and upgrade to Quicken Essentials, which I did. That’s where I was wrong.
This decision has been a year in the making.
Goodbye Quicken, Hello iBank
There’s only one problem. Intuit, with Quicken Essentials 2010 for Macintosh, has stolen your data. They are preventing you, once you’ve converted to Quicken Essentials, from ever exporting your data again for use in any other software, including their own! (no exporting into TurboTax anymore) Intuit is locking you into the Quicken family and there is very little reason why they would ever provide a way back out, other than consumer demand.
Until now.
I’ve spent the last three weeks doing just that. Moving out of Quicken Essentials and into iBank. It wasn’t easy for me, but it will be a lot easier for you, thanks to some programming magic. Some background on why this is so difficult. I’ve eluded to it in my previous article The Dirty Little Secret in Quicken Essentials…You Lose Your Data, but I want to take a moment to just outline how complex this undertaking was for me. First, Intuit only allows for exporting a single account at a time, and then, only in a “CSV” format. I’ve put “CSV” in quotes, because what Intuit exports isn’t even valid CSV (Comma Separated Values) format. If anyone at Intuit is reading this, please fix the format, it would make it so much easier. Worse than exporting invalid CSV, they’ve also filled the file with lines of data that were not actually in the source file. Things like the type of file, dates, subtotals, totals, balances, filter criteria, basically garbage. The export they perform is more of a Register Report than an actual export of transactional data. That makes it very difficult to programmatically parse. I’m sure that was the whole point of them doing it, but it frustrated me. Finally, they actually fail to export certain key pieces of data. Do you have a split transaction? Does that split have a parent transaction that may have a different Memo from each of the child transactions? Too bad, it’s gone. Quicken Essentials only exports the child transactions in a split, not the parent. I have to re-build the parent based on the totals of the children. Even worse, Quicken Essentials might take the parent transaction Memo and put it on one of the children if that child transaction doesn’t have a Memo, it’s crazy!
![Mac Mac](/uploads/1/1/7/8/117885097/568904870.jpg)
Okay, so you know this was hard. Fortunately for you, and me, it works. Let’s get started moving you from Quicken Essentials to iBank 4.
Exporting from Quicken Essentials
The first step in exporting your Quicken Essentials data is to take stock of where you are in the process. I converted all of my Quicken 2007 data into Quicken Essentials. That amounted to 15 years of financial data. I have 78 different accounts and over 20,000 transactions. I did not want to export those a single account at a time. So, my first step was locating my old Quicken 2007 data file, which I did (thank you iDisk!). I then fired up Quicken 2007, opened the old file, and exported the whole thing as a QIF format file, then imported it into iBank 4. This is all a relatively straight-forward exercise, because back when Quicken 2007 came out, Intuit actually supported Macintosh users, sort of. Hopefully you either have your original Quicken 2007 (or earlier) data file or you have the QIF export you made when you converted to Quicken Essentials. If you were a new user to Quicken Essentials and only have about a year’s worth of data in Quicken Essentials, then you can just follow these instructions. If you’re using an old QIF file, go ahead and import that into iBank 4 to get yourself established there. The rest of these instructions assume you have a mixture of data in each account that you want to move into a valid QIF file for importing elsewhere.
Step 1
Select the account from which you wish to export transactions from the left-hand navigation menu in Quicken Essentials. Then set the Transactions being viewed to All Dates:
[![](http://res.cloudinary.com/robpickering/image/upload/v1480171703/QETransactionsListed_sl7rnq.png 'QETransactionsListed')](http://res.cloudinary.com/robpickering/image/upload/v1480171703/QETransactionsListed_sl7rnq.png)Transactions Viewed
### Step 2Select the transactions you wish to export. You have two choices here: one, select only the newer transactions if you have already imported some of them into your other program; or two, skip this step entirely to export all of the transactions available in the account.
Step 3
Export the transactions by selecting Export from the File menu. During this step, for reasons unknown to everyone, the Export menu option will only be available if you have a transaction selected, regardless of which account you have selected. If you’re exporting the whole account, just select any single transaction. If you’re exporting just certain transactions, then you already have them selected.
[![](http://res.cloudinary.com/robpickering/image/upload/h_300,w_174/v1480171703/QEExport_jb0mbi.png 'QEExport')](https://robpickering.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/QEExport.png)Export from File Menu
### Step 4Set the options for the transaction export. If you are exporting the entire account, make sure it says All visible transactions. If you are only exporting your selected transactions, make sure it says Selected transactions only. Set your export location and file name. Unfortunately, you cannot select any other format for the export besides CSV (Comma Separated Value), even though Intuit made this a drop-down box, no idea why. Click Save when you’re ready to perform the export.
[![](http://res.cloudinary.com/robpickering/image/upload/h_197,w_300/v1480171702/QECSV_c3nizt.png 'QECSV')](https://robpickering.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/QECSV.png)Export Settings
You’ve now got a “CSV” formatted output file of your transactions. Unfortunately, it’s a long way from being usable to most financial programs.Enter qecsv2qif.pl
And now without further ado the source code for qecsv2qif.pl:
[perl collapse=”true” gutter=”true”]
use strict;
use warnings;
use Getopt::Std;
use Switch;
use Text::CSV;
use Tie::File;
use Tie::Handle::CSV;
use warnings;
use Getopt::Std;
use Switch;
use Text::CSV;
use Tie::File;
use Tie::Handle::CSV;
$Carp::Verbose = 1;
$|=1;
$|=1;
use vars qw/$VERSION $VERBOSE $csv $line %opt/;
sub processSplit;
$VERSION=”1.0″;
sub main::VERSION_MESSAGE { print $0.’, Version ‘.$main::VERSION.”n” }
sub main::HELP_MESSAGE { print “Usage: $0 -f
You’ll see each of the columns in your file listed. At the top of the file are drop-down menus to select what that column represents. Here’s an example file with the columns selected to match my Quicken Essentials CSV file.
sub main::VERSION_MESSAGE { print $0.’, Version ‘.$main::VERSION.”n” }
sub main::HELP_MESSAGE { print “Usage: $0 -f
Convert From Ibank To Quicken For Mac Free
Select the CSV file you created from Quicken Essentials.[![](http://res.cloudinary.com/robpickering/image/upload/h_233,w_300/v1480171701/iBankSelect_tz5xsh.png 'iBankSelect')](https://robpickering.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/iBankSelect.png)Select CSV File
iBank will then bring up the CSV Import Tool with the top of your file listed. Initially this window is WAY too small to use effectively, just drag the window larger using the window handler in the bottom right corner.[![](http://res.cloudinary.com/robpickering/image/upload/h_109,w_300/v1480171700/iBankCSVFirst_jya9cq.png 'iBankCSVFirst')](https://robpickering.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/iBankCSVFirst.png)Initial iBank CSV Import
![Ibank Ibank](/uploads/1/1/7/8/117885097/974099255.png)
Ibank For Windows
[![](http://res.cloudinary.com/robpickering/image/upload/h_109,w_300/v1480171700/iBankCSVDone_s9ykhu.png 'iBankCSVDone')](https://robpickering.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/iBankCSVDone.png)iBank CSV Import
Now that you have all of the columns selected, click the **OK** button and iBank will process the transactions and place them in the Transaction Download window.[![](http://res.cloudinary.com/robpickering/image/upload/h_267,w_300/v1480171699/iBankPNCImport_pfa6ym.png 'iBankPNCImport')](https://robpickering.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/iBankPNCImport.png)iBank Transaction Import
Transactions that iBank believes are new will have a green check mark, transactions that iBank believes are duplicates will have no checkmark. Scan through the file and make sure it seems correct, then click **Import** and your transactions will be placed in iBank.There are several issues using the built-in CSV Import tool with iBank that my program does’t have:
- Quicken Essentials puts Categories in one column and Transfers in another. So, you have to pick one (pick Categories). Unfortunately that means NONE of your transfers will import correctly and you’ll have to manually edit all of them.
- iBank doesn’t recognize the Split column. So all of your splits will import as separate transactions.
- iBank doesn’t support Tags, so if you used Tags in Quicken, you’ll lose them all. My program will save the Tags if you didn’t put in a Memo for that transaction.
- For some reason iBank doesn’t expose the Reconcile column, so none of your transaction statuses will be saved.
If the above issues don’t bother you, than give that a try, as it will certainly save you some time in getting my Perl program running.
Update 2 – 20110221
There seems to be some confusion about an update that Intuit did for Quicken Essentials 2010 for Mac last week. That update, version 1.5.2, allowed provided the following: “You can now export Quicken Essentials for Mac data using the .QXF file transfer format”. You can read the full release notes for Quicken Essentials v1.5.2 here.
The first thing you need to know is that the “.QXF file transfer format” is proprietary to Intuit / Quicken. It is not a file transfer format that anyone else supports. It’s essentially worthless unless you wish to move your data from one Quicken product to another (like from the Quicken Essentials 2010 for Mac to Quicken Premier 2010 for Windows).
Convert From Ibank To Quicken For Mac Download
The .QFX file transfer format is a relatively open file format based on .OFX. The .QFX format and the .QXF format are totally different. You can read a little bit about QFX here. If Intuit allowed you to export as QFX there would be no reason for this article, but they do not.
Ibank Software
Update 3 – 20110307
A reader of this article, Chris, wrote me to point out that Intuit’s Quicken Essentials data format (.quickendata) is a SQLite database. I did a little digging using Mike T’s SQLite Database App and sure enough, the data is all stored in 37 different SQLite tables. You cannot open the .quickendata file directly, as that file is actually just a container for a bunch of data. The SQLite database is actually a file called data inside of that file, and if you use Mike T’s SQLite Database App to open it, then you’ll have to extract it out of the container first (just right-click on it and select Show Package Contents). This opens up several possibilities for developers to reverse engineer the database schema and get a much more accurate translation of your transactions. Stay tuned!