QIF Master 5.71 review

QIF Master is a MacOS X Cocoa application that makes it easier to enter banking, credit card, and investment transactions into Quicken.

License: Shareware OS: Mac OS X File size: 4326K Developer: John Woodward Buy Now Price: $16.00 Updated: 09 Oct 2006

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QIF Master is a MacOS X Cocoa application that makes it easier to enter banking, credit card, and investment transactions into Quicken.

Bank And Credit Card Transactions: Many online banks and credit card companies allow you to download recent transactions (checks, deposits, credit card charges, etc.) into a file in the Quicken Interchange Format (QIF), so that you can import these transactions into your Quicken account.  The problem with this approach is that typically the bank has no way of assigning meaningful categories to the transactions.  So, if you care about categorizing your Quicken transactions, you must go through each transaction you have just imported in Quicken, and add categories.   QIF Master automates this process.

Some banks and credit card companies also produce transaction histories in QFX or OFX format. OFX is an open standard format, and QFX is a Quicken-specific variant. Quicken can import QFX format (Quicken calls this Web Connect) and match transactions with transactions already in your register. This matching is useful, but if you like your transactions automatically categorized, you might prefer to process the QFX or OFX with QIF Master, which will convert it to QIF and add categories. If all you have available is OFX, you cannot import it into Quicken, but you can convert it to QIF and then import it.

QIF Master adds Quicken categories based on the description (e.g. payee) of each transaction. To convert a QIF file, just drop it onto QIF Master.  You can configure QIF Master as a browser helper application for files of type application/qif to have it run automatically on downloaded QIF files. The resulting file can then be imported into Quicken.

Investment Transactions: Although recent versions of Quicken for the Macintosh have allowed investment transactions to be downloaded into Quicken, in many cases the downloads are incomplete and sometimes wrong. An alternative approach is to use QIF Master to extract QIF from your investment firm's transaction history web page and import that QIF into Quicken. Investment information is not produced in QIF format by the investment firms; to get QIF you must use QIF Master to convert the transactions on the web page into QIF.

CSV Files: QIF Master will also convert comma-separated value (CSV) files into QIF.

Finally, QIF Master also performs other useful transformations on any financial data it can process, producing output data as CSV or tab-separated entries in text files. Thus, QIF Master can convert financial data from QIF, OFX, QFX, web pages,

Limitations:
You can try it out for 30 days, but if you still use it thereafter, you must register it.