Quickbooks File Extensions & Formats To Import Transactions

Use the Transactions app to convert your transaction files to required by your accounting software file format.

Quickbooks imports transactions in original formats. Depending on the source of transactions (online banking download, accounting service export, transfer data between two computers), a specific format should be used for a particular purpose. Quickbooks file extensions to import transactions are:

• .QBO (Web Connect) format

• .IIF (Intuit Interchange format)

• .QBJ (Quickbooks Journal Entry files)

Quickbooks Web Connect (.qbo) format

Banks and credit card companies provide QBO files to download transactions. QBO files have account details like account id, bank id, currency, ending balance, and date. QBO file has the following transaction details:

• date

• amount

• payee

• description

• check number

• unique transaction-id

Quickbooks imports .QBO files under Bank Feeds. As banks do not have specific accounting details for their clients, .QBO files do not have Categories or expense/income account details. Once transactions are imported under the Bank Feeds, Quickbooks does matching to vendor records and expense/income accounts.

Quickbooks IIF (.iif) format

Intuit developed the IIF format for its QuickBooks products and many software packages support export in this format for transactions, sale receipts, bills, invoices and other data lists. As IIF is considered a "system-level" format where data are imported directly into Quickbooks data file.

For transactions, IIF format supplies the following details:

• date

• amount

• vendor or customer[:job]

• description

• main account

• expense/income account

• class

Quickbooks Journal Entry (.qbj) format

The QBJ format is a new format for Quickbooks that allows import for general journal entries. Normally, you would need the Accounting edition of Quickbooks to create such files (as an accountant or bookkeeper) and send to your clients to import. There is a tool, like CSV2QBJ that allows you to create a QBJ file from an Excel spreadsheet. IMPORTANT: CSV2QBJ is replaced with the General Journal Entries app at https://www.propersoft.net/products/general-journal-entries 

Each Quickbooks journal entry contains two or lines (debit and credit) that must balance within the entry. Each line carries an account, optional or mandatory name (depending on the account), class, description, document number.

The QBJ format requires account numbers to be activated in your Quickbooks chart of accounts.